


If You Want to Make an Omelet

by battersea



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Mpreg, Teen Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-17 03:20:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 37,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8128447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battersea/pseuds/battersea
Summary: If they'd talked about things, this could have been prevented. If not for his anxiety, maybe something could have been done about it. Or, Jack Zimmermann's junior hockey career is derailed in a rather inauspicious manner.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I think this is a crack fic.
> 
> There's a second half of this that's been written and needs to be edited! I'll likely post it after the next week of updates is over. I was worried that 3.7-8 might joss some of this, but I'm ... actually really happy that what we got about Jack and Kent's attitudes in those comics kind of bolsters what I'd written? SIGH OF RELIEF.

It takes Jack a couple of weeks to come up with a plan: tell no one, keep playing, get hit, miscarry.

Plans typically require more action, but that’s not within Jack’s means. Everyone knows him here—everyone. They’d probably take him off the team. His parents would come up, pack up his stuff, throw it in their car, take him home. It’d be over—no more hockey. Hockey is the only real bond Jack’s ever formed, the only thing he really knows. This thing inside of him … is not that. Kent’s thing, he realizes. Well, he and Kent already have hockey between them; there’s no room between them for anything else. If Jack didn’t feel so stupid—if he wasn’t taking constant breaks during practice to climb out of and back into his hockey gear so that he could piss—if he could eat full meals without puking them up—if he could stop eating in the first place—the whole situation is fucked. It’s terminal.

Jack starts fights just hoping they’ll end with him socked in the gut. He prays for a knee, an elbow, a hip check. It’s not like him, says his coach, but fuck it—who’s to say it’s not? No one knows who Jack is, not really.

Well—maybe Kent does.

“You taste different,” Kent tells him. It’s like—okay, Jack hadn’t thought of that. That had not been part of his plan.

“No I don’t,” Jack says, but he jerks off again that night and licks some tentatively off of his fingers, just to see if this is verifiable. It tastes more or less the same as Kent’s, and Jack’s never tried his own before, so really, what the fuck?

“When you said I tasted different,” Jack asks, a few days later. “I tried some. How’s it different?”

“Tried what?” Kent asks.

“You know.” Jack mimes jerking off. He has to pee again. He just went twenty minutes ago.

Kent laughs at him. “It’s just subtle?” Jack hates that he sounds like he’s asking; Kent is supposed to be the expert here, and if neither of them knows what’s up, well. That’s bad news for everybody. “When you experience something every day you notice when it’s different. Did you switch protein powders?”

“Yes,” Jack lies.

“Your whole body is like, new,” Kent says. “Everything tastes different. Your sweat smells new. Your ass smells new. Your hair is like—there’s more of it?”

Jack literally wants to die. He wants to actually, physically die. Because, you know. If he doesn’t, he’s gonna have this handsome asshole’s baby.

“You’re cute when you blush like that,” says Kent. “You’re cute all the time, though. Lemme suck you off and then you can tell me about the new stuff.”

“New what?”

“The new protein powder?”

“It’s just—” Jack is actually so tired he can’t even come up with a lie, or a witty retort. He just hastens out of his seat, sighs when Kent has to let go of the waistband of his jeans, and says, “I have to pee.”

He does so, and then washes his hands. Then he sits down on the closed lid of the toilet in Kent’s billet family’s guest bathroom, puts his head in his hands, and cries. He used to have panic attacks, probably still does, but now he can’t tell them apart from where he is, just in general. The crying, the puking, the constant feeling that the world is so huge and something inside of him is growing larger and more terrifying and it’s going to consume him and he’s not able to stop it just by thinking it away—that’s it, that’s the same feeling.

Jack can’t pretend he hasn’t been crying. There’s no way to fix that, other than sitting in the bathroom for an hour so his eyes can get less swollen. He has to go out there, say goodbye, go home.

“Are you okay?” Kent asks, when Jack leaves the bathroom.

He doesn’t answer, because—no, of course not. He hates Kent suddenly. What kind of question is that? No, Jack is not okay, he’s clearly been crying his eyes out, and it’s Kent’s fault, and just—whatever.

“I’m going home,” Jack says. He wishes Kent would beg him to stay, actually. He wishes Kent would wrap him up and tell him it’s fine and they’re stronger than other individual people when they’re together and that Kent’s going to miss Jack when Jack is gone, thirty seconds from now. But, the thing is, if Kent did that, Jack would instinctively push him off and say “don’t touch me” and leave anyway.

~ ~ ~

Jack thinks of himself as efficient, proactive, as someone who does what he has to do. His goal has been the NHL for as long as he can remember. He has come up through the system on schedule, ticking off boxes and hitting milestones, making the roster and getting, incrementally, better. It’s hard, because he started out good to begin with, but he’s never let himself stop trying.

Now he is tired and no amount of sleep will help. He’s taking an awful lot of pills. It’s for his own comfort, though part of him hopes it might help to dislodge—whatever. The deeper he gets into this thing, the less likely it is to not work out. Jack can easily imagine this bringing oceans of calm to someone, some dreamy housewife in her 30s who’s been waiting, and waiting. Jack is waiting now, because he doesn’t have it in him to take action on this. What’s he supposed to do? Jack knows he should tell someone, tell Kent, probably—but, okay, how do you voice that? “You got me pregnant,” Jack says to the mirror over the sink in his en suite. He tries, “I’m pregnant,” but he likes the first one better. It’s tighter, fewer opportunities for Kent to get off the hook. It’s as much Kent’s fault as it is Jack’s. Kent could have said, “Hey, Zimms, we are treading dangerously close to the edge here.” He also understands why Kent didn’t. When it’s been that fucking good, who in his right mind is going to want to walk back from that?

Yet when push comes to shove he cannot do it. Jack plays around with ideas. He could tell his coach; maybe the team would keep quiet and help him take care of it, especially since they are serious contenders this season, and Jack is no small part of that. He could tell his billet parents, who would be responsible for reaching out to other parties. In that case, Jack could spare himself a series of awkward conversations and just tell his real parents, who love him so much that even in their disappointment they would probably be happy to have a baby version of Jack around. His mother likes to sit with him and flip through his baby pictures, not just sometimes but on a regular basis; it’s, like, what they _do_ together. “Your _little_ _face_ ,” she coos. Jack was actually a squish-faced baby and even as he’s still hoping to be rid of it, he breathes relief in the knowledge that Kent is hot and was probably an attractive baby. Jack thinks that if he were going to actively want a baby he would probably want it to not be ugly like him. Still, Jack can’t imagine ever wanting one. He likes them, they’re so soft and they have this smell that’s not _good_ but it’s different than any other scent on earth. He just doesn’t want one. He doesn’t want one, but every time he opens his mouth to deliver the bad news to Kent, his anxiety stops him. What if Kent stops liking him? What if Kent isn’t willing to endure this? What if the magic spell breaks and they can’t instinctively pass to each other anymore? That’s what keeps Jack up at night. Which isn’t good. He’s so frightened he’s barely sleeping.

He doesn’t know how far along he is, exactly, but things seem to be progressing. He’s decreasingly sick. He stops peeing quite so frequently. Before, he felt ravenous all the time, but he had aversions to almost everything he used to like. Peanut butter started revolting him and he began eating jelly sandwiches, but the only kind of jelly he could tolerate was concord grape, and if anyone should happen to offer him strawberry or—god forbid—mixed fruit it caused him to experience violent waves of nausea, like, _mixed fruit_ , who invented that? Why would you mix fruit? It didn’t taste like anything, it had this generic taste that made Jack queasy, and just the smell of it is still enough to make him want to grab a trash can.

“Mixed fruit jam doesn’t have a smell,” Kent had said when Jack brought this up. “How can it disgust you? What the fuck.”

“It has a gross smell,” Jack kept insisting.

“You are _so weird_ , Zimms,” Kent muttered. “So weird.”

Jack just prayed Kent didn’t pull any of his usual shit and show up at Jack’s window with a jar of mixed fruit jam he intended to use for lube.

He doesn’t, though, because probably using jam to fuck is so gross that even Kent can’t bring himself to muster enthusiasm. Jack is a little disappointed. He was looking forward to acting above the idea.

~ ~ ~

Gear is getting tight. He can barely get his gloves on. It’s weird—that’s not where he thought he’d gain weight, and it’s happening sooner than he would have assumed, but then, none of this is what he was expecting, because he’s been walking around in murky denial for months. Anyway, he knows his fingers aren’t _fat_ , they’re swollen, but he can’t keep asking for new pairs, and this thing could go on forever. At least he can loosen his shorts if he has to, which—he has to. He buys new jocks because that’s really easy, but the new ones don’t really fit so great, or, rather, they don’t offer a lot of support. Everything’s swollen. Everything’s swollen everywhere. It’s hell. These new jocks have a pretty thick waistband, which Jack for some reason thought would be very comfortable. But they’re very restricting, so he keeps trying to push them down, especially while he’s skating. Eventually he just has to wear them under his stomach, and suddenly it’s really obvious. Jack wakes up every morning and promises himself he’s not going to allow Kent to so much as see him naked, let alone touch him, but Kent’s got what they call “soft hands” and they’re quicker than Jack’s will, which is pretty weak, at least where sex with Kent is concerned.

He just wants it constantly now, which is a real problem. Every time they fool around, Jack holds his breath, because surely this will be the time that Kent catches on and is like, hey. Hey, I see what’s going on here! But apparently Kent is an idiot and hasn’t noticed. He notices when Jack’s jizz changes flavor, but not when Jack’s boxer-briefs are stretching over the bare protrusion of his stomach. Maybe Kent won’t notice, ever. Maybe Jack could fucking die and Kent wouldn’t notice. He’d just come into the room and step over Jack’s corpse and say, “Hey, Zimms,” like nothing weird was up, reach for a protein bar, sit there munching it while Jack’s cadaver rotted at his feet. It’s a morbid thought but by the time Kent _does_ notice, it’s gone from being terrifying to being funny to being hurtful that Kent hasn’t said anything, at least, up until that point.

When he finally manages it’s not in the privacy of Kent’s bedroom, during sex, as Jack would have hoped. It’s on a really miserable and gray afternoon, which sees Jack struggling to get his shorts laced up. He really can’t believe he’s gotten this fat so quickly. These things accommodate some pretty big guys. Maybe it’s not so much his body as the fact that he’s distracted and his fingers are swollen up like fucking taquitos and he is trying and trying to get these stupid things fastened on his body and, fuck, they just won’t go.

“Need help?” Kent asks. He’s actually got a lascivious look on his face, like maybe what Jack needs help with as he’s missing the start of practice is having his dick sucked.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Just—go. I’ll catch up.”

But Jack doesn’t catch up, even when Kent leaves to go skate. He slides onto the bench and puts his gloved hands on his eyes and bawls like a dumb fucking baby. He hasn’t cried for like a month now, which is really good, considering. He’d get up and grab some pills from his bag, but then he’d have to exert energy and just, man, energy is not expendable for him right now.

Anyway, that’s when Kent does come back, to catch Jack crying.

“Man, are you okay?” he asks.

Jack just looks up with big, wet eyes. He’s sniffling like a child. It’s so fucked. He’s so fucked.

“Jack,” says Kent. He says ‘Jack’ so it’s serious.

Oh shit, Jack thinks to himself. Oh shit, oh shit, here it comes, oh shit.

To Kent’s credit, he appears to be in serious pain when he says, “I know you’re not pregnant, because if you were, I know you wouldn’t keep it from me for like, months.”

“You don’t know shit,” Jack says, trying to pull off one of his gloves. He can’t. It’s so stuck.

“Let me.” Kent sighs, and he squats down on the floor, and eases the glove off with his bare hands.

Sighing in relief, Jack meets Kent’s eyes. He doesn’t say he’s sorry. Actually, he’s not sorry. He has a lot of regrets, but he doesn’t feel apologetic.

Kent puts his hands in the middle of Jack’s breast. He’s not touching Jack at all—he’s touching jersey, his palm resting against padding. “You don’t want to keep it, do you?”

It sounds so callous, but Jack matches it: “Not really. I just want to get back to the hockey.”

“Yeah,” Kent says, and he kisses Jack like kisses are hockey, as if slotting one in here is going to make up for the things he really wants. Jack’s heard the phrase _tonsil hockey_ but it doesn’t really fit, to him. Kissing is like moving together, but hockey is a competition. He plays well with Kent because only one of them gets to win at the end of their time in juniors.

Well, Jack still wants that chance to win.

The next day, they ditch school. It’s a Friday, which is awfully convenient. There’s a morning practice, which Kent attends; Jack misses it. They go to the _clinique de planning des naissances_. Jack shocks himself by remaining calm as he’s interviewed, has blood drawn, pees into a little cup. When a doctor tells him, “Oh, yeah, you are definitely pregnant,” he doesn’t feel much of anything. He already knew this. Instead, he looks at Kent, for whom the information may only just now be registering. It’s one thing to confront someone in the locker room, Jack thinks. It’s well another to have a physician say it out loud.

Anyway, things go quickly from there. “I don’t want to keep it,” Jack says, without missing a beat. “I can’t have a baby.”

This doctor looks at him like, well, that’s great, good luck. “Let’s take a look,” he says, sending Jack toward a tech who will perform a sonogram. Actually, this part is hard, because the thing on the screen does look at awful lot like a baby. It’s got a head and the outline of a torso.

“Those are feet,” the tech points out. “It’s early to tell the sex, so kind of a long shot, but we can try to take a look.”

“Yeah, let’s look,” says Kent. Jack has forgotten he’s even there, just shakes his head slowly: _no_. Kent doesn’t get to fucking know!

The doctor comes back in, stares at it. “And you’ve got no idea how long this has been happening? You know the dates of your last cycle?”

“Well, I wasn’t trying,” Jack says, like he hasn’t told them a million times already that he’s got no clue.

“I think what we’re looking at here is in the ballpark of sixteen weeks. I want to be on the conservative side—this baby seems a little small for that based on how it’s developing. Then again, if you haven’t been under any kind of medical guidance or care it’s easy to imagine he’s just not getting the right kind of nutrients, you know?”

“Then why am I showing?”

“It’s not necessarily correlated.”

Jack has been having this conversation in French, and hoping Kent isn’t picking up most of it, because Kent’s French is pretty borderline. He gets a lot of Cs and low Bs in school. But he hears enough and asks, “It’s a he?”

“I’m being general,” says the doctor, in English. “Anyway, I’m going to furnish you with some information about adoption services in Quebec. Though there’s no legal time limit on abortions in Canada, we’re not equipped to perform them past thirteen weeks and, more to the point, it’s not easy to access one past a certain point—you’re into the second trimester here. If you don’t want to carry to term you’re going to have to find a place outside of Rimouski.”

“But, is it possible?” Jack asks. “I really don’t want to have this baby.”

All he gets is a sad look. “Let me get you that information,” the doctor says, and the sonogram is shut off. The tech wipes the slime off of Jack’s stomach.

When Jack and Kent are alone in the room, Jack crosses his arms over his chest and says, “I hope you know this is your fault.”

“Me! How is it _my_ fault?”

“Why didn’t you just use a condom?”

“Why didn’t _you_ just use a condom?” Kent sighs. He actually seems defeated. “Well, great. What are we going to do?”

Well, Jack’s pants are already off, and that bottle of conductor gel is still sitting there, so the first thing they do is bone on the exam table.

The second thing they do is go back to Kent’s house and stew. Jack is hungry, so Kent’s billet mom orders them a pizza. They don’t talk about this at all until Jack is passing out in the late afternoon. “Zimms,” Kent says, shaking him to make sure he’s not asleep. “You gotta—what are we doing? I need to know.”

“I need a week to think about it,” Jack says. He can’t think about it because his pills are on the other side of the room, in his bag, and he’s really too tired to go and get them. They would only put him to sleep anyway, and besides—he’s been advised to stop taking them.

“Is a week a luxury we really have, though? Because according to the internet, that thing inside you is like the size of a pepper or a tomato, but next week, it could be a fucking banana or a carrot or a spaghetti squash.”

“Kent,” Jack says. “Kent, shut the fuck up.” He passes out.

The third thing they do is nothing, because that’s how Jack feels. He feels nothing, like doing nothing. So he does nothing. He waits for Kent to say something like, hey, asshole, you have to do something here, maybe make some decisions! But Kent doesn’t say anything like that, and Jack is too scared to figure out his next move. Which is where he was before, so what purpose did any of that serve? The big difference is that now when Kent fucks him, he says shit like, “I can’t believe I bred this hot ass,” which, he’d better start believing it soon, because Jack really needs Kent to get with the program on this one, and Jack is personally bankrupt when it comes to ideas about how to go forward. But when Kent’s not coming on Jack’s tits and sucking it off, he mostly just seems sad, like maybe he’s pissed that they’re not going to actually raise this baby, which they haven’t _decided_ but it’s not happening regardless.

So, Jack presses him on it.

“Of course I don’t want to have a baby,” Kent says. “Holy shit, do I look like I do somehow? Look at me.” Jack looks at him. He’s wearing a baggy Britney Spears t-shirt (“from the Onyx Hotel tour, can you believe it?”—Jack can’t because he doesn’t know what that is) and drinking a protein shake out of a plastic goblet that’s shaped like a skeleton hand.

When they part to go home for Christmas, Kent stretches his arms around Jack and grabs his ass. “Keep it tight for me,” he says. Then he changes his mind: “Actually, keep it loose so I can get in there ASAP when I see you on New Year’s.”

“Sure,” Jack says, like he imagines they’re going to be having a bunch of sex. It’s going to be 2009 and they’re going to celebrate by telling Jack’s parents. He can’t imagine unclenching for long enough to let Kent in. It’s gonna be a long, long week.

~ ~ ~

Jack’s parents came up to see a game early in the season. Was that before or after he got into this mess? Unclear. What Jack is sure of is that they’ll know as soon as they take one look at him. He’s been driving for six hours and he would really appreciate something to eat and at least one loving embrace. He misses his mother’s arms around him, the scent of her expensive perfume an intoxicant, her French manicure on his scalp when she buries her hands in his hair. Jack loves touch. Sometimes he is jealous of his own child, nestled in his body, supported on all sides. Seems pretty nice. He would love that.

His mother doesn’t get close enough to give him any hugs, though. She’s holding her own arms around herself, because it’s cold outside, and she’s just stepped out into the driveway to come greet him, maybe offer to help him with one of his bags.

“Oh my god,” she says, “You’re pregnant.” He’s not wearing a jacket because he was sweaty in the car.

There’s really no way to respond to that! Or, there might have been, had he planned for this. Instead, he says, “Don’t tell Papa,” in this sad little boy way.

“Don’t tell him?” she says. “I don’t need to. He’ll figure it out, he’s not stupid. How—eh. It’s cold out here. Come talk to me inside.”

Dutifully, he follows her in. “I’m really hungry.”

“I’ll make you something.” Jack is dreaming of something really good, something he’s been missing: St-Viateur bagels, smoked meat, some kind of casserole or meat pie. Home stuff—he wants that. Instead, his mother drags an industrial-sized plastic bag of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets out of the freezer and starts tossing them onto a plate.

“How many do you want?” she asks. She sounds pissed.

“Uh.” Jack could eat that whole bag. “Ten?”

Probably because he doesn’t deserve nice things, she puts them in the microwave. The best way to cook frozen food is in the oven. Everyone knows this. Even Jack knows this.

He inhales his dinosaur nuggets but when he looks up to ask his mother for more, he’s filled with a sense of shame that prevents him from doing so. He doesn’t deserve more. He should just be hungry.

“How long has this been going on for?” she asks. “How far along?”

“I don’t know,” Jack says, and she gives him a look. “Well, I’m told maybe eighteen weeks.”

“Eighteen weeks,” she says.

Jack’s response is, “I can’t help it.”

He was being sincere, too, but she bursts out, “You _can’t help it_?”

It’s hard to say if she’s angry.

Anyway, then his dad comes home, and he walks into the kitchen saying, “Guess whose car is in the driveway?” He sounds so pleased that it makes Jack tear up. The last time his dad is happy to see him—regrettable.

“Bob,” his mother says. “Your son is pregnant.”

Professional hockey legend and Canadian national hero Bob Zimmermann looks like someone has just pulled his pants down in public. It’s that kind of shock and embarrassment. “Oh?” he asks. He approaches slowly, which he never does. He puts a hand on Jack’s shoulder, but then he withdraws it.

“He’s been pregnant for eighteen weeks,” she says. “And he’s been playing all season.”

“Wow,” is all Bob can manage.

“Maybe not that long,” Jack says. “Doctor says it’s hard to know.”

“At least you saw a doctor,” says his mother.

“What doctor?” asks his dad.

“Clinician. Um, in town.” Jack wishes he had the guts to ask for more chicken nuggets.

“You need to see a real doctor,” says his mother. “It’s too late to—take care of it, isn’t it?”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to take care of it.”

Jack feels himself go red in the face. This is just—“I wanted to!” he swears. “I asked! I didn’t want it.”

“If there’s someone who can take care of this we’ll find it,” says his dad. “Insane. Things have changed. If someone _my_ age had gotten into a situation it’d be taken care of immediately.”

“That’s assuming they knew about it.” Jack’s mom pauses. “Whose is it?”

He waits for as long as he can, but eventually Jack has to say, “Parse.”

“ _Kent Parson_?” his mother hisses, like Jack just told her he has the bubonic plague—like he’s contracted something from fleas.

“That kid’s a great player. Shocking, for his size. Great player.”

“I guess it’s okay that he impregnated your son, then?”

“Well,” Jack’s father starts to say, like, _maybe_?

This is going so badly, and Jack is so hungry, that he just interrupts whatever his mother’s trying to say to ask, “Can I have some more chicken nuggets?”

“Make them yourself,” she says. “Bag’s in the freezer.”

Jack just stares at her, sadly. He goes home to be babied. He doesn’t know how to use the microwave.

“Well, you’re doing all the other adult things, I guess,” she continues. “If you’re going to have a kid I guess you’ll need to feed it.”

“I’m not going to keep it,” he says, struggling out of the chair. He gets the bag of nuggets out and places it on the counter. The kitchen is large enough that each movement takes forever. “Parse is coming up here for New Year’s, right? We were going to tell you.”

“You were going to wait that long to tell us,” his mother says.

“You’re not keeping it?” his dad asks.

“No, of course not!” Now Jack is angry. “We’re both playing hockey, so, what would we do if we had a baby? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, what are you going to _do_ with it?”

“I guess someone will adopt it,” Jack says, to his father. He starts untwisting the tie around the nugget bag. His mother has twisted it up a dozen times and Jack’s fingers are too clumsy and too swollen to do this effectively.

“Here,” she says, grabbing it away from him. “Jesus, just, what the fuck? Well, it figures. Who’s going to adopt it, Jack?”

“I guess someone,” Jack says, thinking about it for the first time. “I guess you don’t find out who?”

“What do you mean, you don’t find out who? Have you looked into this at all? Have you researched it? If you want someone to adopt your baby you have to plan for it! You just don’t give it to the nurse and say, here, I don’t actually want this.” She’s shouting this at him while she arranges the nuggets around the center of the plate, like the dinosaurs are all marching in a circle. That was how Jack demanded they be served to him as a child, with a blob of ketchup in the middle. She hasn’t managed to look at him as she’s doing this.

“Well,” says Jack’s father, in a voice that’s a little too loud. “Our work is cut out for us.”

“ _Our_ work,” Jack’s mother says. She makes air quotes.

“You’re going to see a proper physician. We’re going to reach out to some adoption agencies. I’ll call the team—you need to be on IR for the rest of the season. I’m sure we can get some good advice about—the public dimension.”

“He’s not going back for the season,” says his mother. “He’s staying here. I want him off that team.”

Jack’s father gives him an apologetic look, but he says, “Makes sense.”

“But, the team—”

When Jack’s mother puts the nuggets in the microwave, she slams the door shut, hard. “I’m sorry, this isn’t sinking in.” Okay, Jack thinks. She does seem angry. “You think you’re going back to Rimouski?”

“Parse,” Jack says, weakly. It’s all he can get out.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” says his mother. “Where do you think your father was while I was pregnant?”

“I tried to be here,” Jack’s father offers.

“He was in Pittsburgh playing hockey, mostly.”

The microwave is finished cooking his second plate of nuggets, and just to get away from his parents, Jack gets up and gets them himself.

Quietly, Bob mutters, “I was only gone for the beginning.”

“This is a mess,” his mother’s saying, as Jack begins to chew a nugget. There are twelve on the plate. He hopes it’s enough. “This is such a damn mess.”

Sighing, Jack’s father walks around the counter and stands next to Jack’s mother. He puts an arm around her shoulders. They both seem drained, and Jack doesn’t feel especially high-energy himself right now, either.

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Jack’s father says, like it’s some comfort.

His mother groans at that. “Well, there’s making a mistake, and then there’s ‘you don’t find out who.’ Not with that attitude, you don’t! I can’t do this.” She rubs her eyes. “I need a shower or a drink or something. No, I need a drink _in_ the shower.” She shakes free of Jack’s father and begins to rifle around the wine cooler.

Jack is staring at the puddle of ketchup in the middle of his plate of chicken nuggets. “Please don’t hate me,” he says to the ketchup.

“Why would we hate you?” Jack father asks. “You don’t have kids if you don’t think you can deal with the hard stuff without hating them, you know?”

The comment just hangs there.

Jack grabs a chicken nugget and shoves the whole thing into his mouth.

“Well.” Jack’s father sighs. “Forget I said anything.”

When Jack’s mother slams a bottle onto the counter, Bob turns to her and says, “Pour me a glass of that too, actually.”

~ ~ ~

“It would have been better if they’d yelled at me,” Jack says to the computer. He’s aware he looks like shit. Usually he’d wash his hair and put on a clean shirt before Skyping Kent, but fuck it. Just, fuck it, at this point.

“Man, really?” Kent asks. He’s wearing a fleece Christmas pajama thing. Jack’s unsure of the English word for it. It’s got little ice skates on it, with pine trees and gingerbread men. Seems random. He looks crazy. Jack wants to rub against him. “I can’t stand being yelled at.  It’s the literal worst.”

“Yeah, but, you weren’t there. It was awful.”

Kent’s smile fades and he sits up. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

Yeah, well. Jack thinks he should be.

Kent interrupts Jack’s pity party to say, “I told my mom.”

“What?” Jack hisses. “Why would you do that?”

“She asked me what was going on. I mean, I’m not gonna _lie_ to her.”

“Why not? It’s none of her business.”

Now Kent seems pissed, which is rare. He’s rarely pissed. “Of course it’s her business!” he shrieks, offended. “Are you nuts? It’s her grandchild!”

Jack just finds that annoying. “No it isn’t,” he says. “I mean, biologically, sure, but this isn’t going to be some baby that she gets to meet. I’m getting rid of it, remember? Or did you not tell her _that_? Does she think we’re going to like get married, raise a baby together—oh my god.” Jack puts his head in his hands. “I have to go with my parents to adoption agencies before Christmas next week.” His heart is starting to beat faster. He really wishes he could end this conversation.

“I said we weren’t keeping it.”

“ _I’m_ not keeping it,” Jack says, his voice hitching up toward a little panic. He hopes Kent can’t hear it. “You don’t get to decide.”

“Well, I don’t want a baby, either, if you recall!”

“Well, if you didn’t and I did how you felt wouldn’t matter, either.”

Cruelly, Kent laughs. “That’s great, Zimms. You’re a piece of work.”

“I am? You’re the one wearing a—what are you even wearing?”

“It’s called a onesie,” Kent says. “Or like, footie pajamas. These things are comfy as hell. My mom got it for me. Early Christmas gift. Don’t tell me you’re not into it.” Jack is into it, actually, especially how lewd Kent’s boner looks under the skate-tree-cookie pattern. Kent puts his hands on his spread thighs, grinning. “Yeah, you’re into it.”

“Don’t bring that when you come here, please. If you wear that in front of my dad I will die.”

“I feel like Bad Bob probably appreciates a fashion statement.”

“Bad Bob wears old man clothes,” Jack says. “He doesn’t need to impress anyone. … Actually, don’t talk about my dad.”

“Well, you brought him up, but, okay.”

“Merci.”

“Cute.”

They stare at each other for a moment.

“Okay,” Kent says. “You wanna finger yourself for me?”

“What?” They’ve never done that—Skype sex. “Are you serious?” Jack asks. “No!”

“Why not?”

“It’s been _one day_.” Jack is s _candalized_.

“Well, I like to see that ass every day if I can help it.”

This staring contest is getting out of hand.  Unfortunately, the way Kent is looking at Jack is making him kind of hard. Not to mention the boner in Kent’s onesie or his footie pajamas or—this goofy thing he’s wearing. Reluctantly, Jack sighs and shifts his hips so he can get his sweats off. He’s gonna need new ones, like, last week.

The whole thing is _brazen_ —Jack gets some shower gel from his bathroom and listens when Kent tells him, “Slower, Zimms, okay? Pangea splitting up. Polar ice caps melting.”

“I think the polar ice caps are melting faster than Pangea split,” Jack manages to pant out. He reaches over to squirt more gel onto his fingers.

“Just, slowly, okay?”

Slowly turns out to be very necessary. The whole parent thing hasn’t exactly got him relaxed, and it’s a little tighter than trying to shove his fat fingers into and out of a hockey glove. He watches Kent watching him, rubbing his dick through the fleece with the heel of his palm while Kent says, “Yeah, that’s it, just—really gentle. Don’t stick it in yet. Just kinda pet it. You know gentle, like it’s a kitten. Like a p—”

“Don’t say it!” Jack barks. He tries to sound like he means it, but he probably doesn’t look very threatening while he’s rubbing a glob of Nivea into his hole.

Laughing, Kent says, “You’re so fucking precious, look at this.” He’s kneading his dick and looking at Jack like he’s the hottest thing on the planet.

It should be impossible for anyone, no matter how depraved, to drink Jack in like he’s anything other than a disaster: sweaty hair, greasy skin, his legs splayed as wide as possible while his laptop balances on a stack of two pillows at the foot of the bed. Not to mention he’s still got his dirty T-shirt on. He’s been wearing it since they had goodbye sex the night before. Kent seems not to notice. He’s probably crazy to be getting off on this. At the same time his eyes are so wide they might very well fall out of his face, and he’s saying half-sweet half-dirty things about global warming, and how if Jack’s ass were a kitten he’d tie a little bow on it and give it some “fresh cream,” which is just—ugh, exhausting. Who says stuff like that? Makes no sense.

But, ultimately, Jack likes it.

Of course, he hates that he likes it, because that’s what got him into this mess.

~ ~ ~

The days leading up to Christmas are hell. One thing about Jack’s father which is sometimes useful and also really annoying is that he’s got an agent, a manager, a publicist, and probably like twelve other people who will both figure out which professionals and services to contact, and also, tell him how to handle real-life situations. When Jack was first diagnosed with his anxiety disorder, for example, these people found him a shrink at a very discreet practice.

Now Jack has to talk to them about his feelings, so that if anyone reaches out, his dad’s team can be prepared with a statement, or at least know how to direct the conversation. Jack, who had media training when he was a child and has developed a set of quick responses to get on with his life, was not coached on how to deal with this situation in particular. He’s freaking out. His dad is there, too, looking pretty resolute. At certain points, when Jack was really overdoing it with pills and stuff, he would dread his dad finding out and having to address it in a public space.

Now his father is saying things like, “So many families in Quebec are waiting for a child to come into their lives,” and, “We’re just lucky that our family is healthy and has the means, in many senses, to get through this together.”

“That’s great,” says one of these people, a middle-aged woman. She looks like she’s been through the wringer with this herself. She keeps making sympathetic faces at Jack, like she gets it or something. She could not possibly have any idea. She’s sitting here doing her job, obviously, so her life must not have been ruined by it. “Jack,” she says, trying to smile with encouragement. “Do you want to add to what your dad’s saying?”

“Uh.” He’s fidgeting really badly, rolling the cord of his hoodie between his thumb and fingers, trying not to make this worse. It’s just a question of saying the right thing so they’ll let him go home. He keeps guessing, and getting it wrong. “I really just want this to be over with,” he says. He means this meeting in particular, but it works with the situation as a whole, also.

But that woman says, “Well, that’s understandable. But it would be really great if you could give us something—not totally revealing, but, a little bit about how you’re feeling?”

“I just want to get back to hockey,” Jack says

A man across the room breaks in to say, “Relatable. But, how do you feel about having a baby?”

“Bad.”

“Because you made a mistake?”

“We can’t criminalize this,” says that woman. “We’re not going to moralize, and make pregnant teenagers feel ashamed.”

“Well, what other angles are there on this?”

“Families waiting for adoptions in Quebec. Bob’s got it.”

“An eighteen-year-old hockey player doesn’t get pregnant because he wants families waiting for adoptions in Quebec to get a baby. What about something like, use protection?” To Jack, this guy asks, “How do you feel about promoting safer sex?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Jack grits out. He feels like he’s about to lose it and cry in front of his dad’s fucking PR people. “I only know about hockey,” he adds.

“There are probably other boys on hockey teams getting into the same situation. It could be really productive to do a PSA about, you’re not any less because this happened, talk to someone, you’re not alone—”

Jack interrupts her by repeating, “I just want to be done with this. I just want to get back to hockey.” He puts his head in his hands and starts shaking. There’s something weird going on today, some swishy feeling that keeps coming and going. It’s some anxiety thing, he figures. He wants his pills so badly he could cry. He might actually cry here, in this office. That would suck.

Luckily, miraculously, his dad gets up and says, “Well, it sounds like there’s a lot to work with here.” Jack knows he’s just saying that when he comes over a puts a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “We should get something to eat. You’re probably hungry, right?”

He is, yeah, but Jack can see that his dad is giving him an out.

On their walk to the car, Jack gets an earful: “These people only want to help. It’s a necessary evil. The minute some blog or some Tweeter gets the news that you’re out of the draft, you’ll be glad we had that meeting.”

“I don’t want to go out to eat,” is all Jack can say in reply.

“Do you want something from home?”

“I want a burger,” Jack says. Normally when he gets worked up he can’t even think about food, but now he’s hungry all the time. It sucks. He doesn’t want to wait until they get home, but every restaurant is going to have a Christmas tree and Christmas music and a billion people in from out of town for the holidays. Jack’s parents put up their tree like normal. The house looks like a movie set. They send out cards with a family picture on the front and a message inside that says something like, “In the spirit of the holidays, a donation has been made to Moisson Montreal in your honor.” They actually give out all that money, which is crazy. Those PR people told them to do it.

Every summer they take the picture for the card on vacation, which is usually over _fête nationale_. Jack likes to ask the photographers about f-stops and exposure times. This year he didn’t. In the picture, he is smiling shyly at the camera, his shaggy hair looking a little weird in the humidity. Kent was standing next to the photographer, smirking, his arms crossed. They had just stopped trying to pretend they didn’t want to have sex all the time, and started having sex all of the time, instead of just fumbling around. Jack had batted Kent away that morning, saying. “I have to look good for this picture.” One of those cards was displayed on a console table in the office Jack and his father have just left. It was at the end of that trip when Kent installed Skype on Jack’s computer and taught him how to use it, so they could talk while they went to prospect camps on other sides of the continent.

One of the things that makes Jack nervous about his father is that Bob always looks as calm and as collected as he does in that photo. The only place Jack has ever seen him get _angry_ is when his shot ends up in a bunker. He hates bunkers. Other than that, if Jack could inherit one thing from his father other than a hockey obsession and hair you can’t do anything with, he would like that poised demeanor. Unfortunately, he got his mother’s tendency to stress and his father’s ass, but like, times a million in both cases. Not a good look on anyone, in combination or otherwise.

Since Jack has problems with even the most basic social situations, his family has a routine: when he’s upset and they have to leave something, his parents will take him to a fast food place and get him a burger and fries to eat in the car. He also likes chicken strips, but since his mother gave him those passive-aggressive dino nuggets he’s not really in the mood. It’s actually been quite a while since they did this, probably not since he was 12 or 13, but Jack eats his burger happily and stares out the window. There’s a lot going on. He’s got a bunch of adoption paperwork to sign and he’s supposed to get the results of his bloodwork back from his doctor, some tests he had to do. There’s also the swishy feeling, which keeps coming and going. Jack figures that maybe if he eats enough french fries he can bury it.

When Jack pauses and looks at his father, Bob takes a little wet wipe and cleans some mustard off of Jack’s face. “You know,” he says, crumpling up the used wipe, “you can do some talk therapy, since you have a little time. I know it was hard to make time in Rimouski, but you also had the pills, but now you don’t have the pills and you do have the time—”

“I’ll think about it,” Jack says, knowing he’s not going to any talk therapy. It would be just like that meeting with the PR people, him having to say what he feels. Only this time, he wouldn’t get the pills, which is the only thing that helps, so forget it.

“Maybe this time is a gift,” his dad adds. “You could keep doing school. Or get an equivalency.”

Jack likes school, so that’s not a bad idea, except that he would hate to have to waddle into a classroom every day and have other people staring at him.

“But if you need time off, that’s okay, too.”

Jack swallows a fry. “Why are you being nice to me?” he asks. “I fucked up.”

“You don’t know why I’d be nice to you?”

Jack shakes his head. “I fucked up,” he repeats.

“No one is happy about that, exactly,” says his dad. “But it’s more like being sad that this happened. You’re still Jack, you know?”

Jack does not know. He’s got no idea what Jack is.

“Your mother’s not wrong. You should have told us earlier. You haven’t been responsible about this overall. Things could have been...different. But I don’t think being mean to you will fix things. We’re already here, right? Plus, I’m sure you feel bad enough as it is. I can only imagine how bad your anxiety is about this.”

What the fuck is happening?

“You’re a good kid, Jack. Your parents have a lot of money. You’re smart, you work hard, and you have the talent to be a phenomenal professional hockey player one day. This isn’t a good thing, I wouldn’t have wished for it, but—you’re going to be just fine. Nothing’s ruined.”

“Nothing’s ruined,” Jack repeats, because he’s not sure how anyone in their right mind could say that to him, right now, and mean it.

“Besides,” his father adds. “It’s a relief not having to pretend about Kent Parson anymore.”

“You knew?” Jack is horrified.

“That kid’s not subtle. The way he looks at you could light up a stadium.” His dad pauses. “Hell of a winger, though. Not subtle on the ice, either. When that kid’s playing, you _know_ it. He sure works for it. Hell of a winger.”

Hell is right. Jack is furious.

He calls Kent as soon as he’s back home and shut in his room. Who else knows?

“Probably no one,” Kent says. “Just our parents, probably.”

“ _Our_ parents?”

“Well, I wasn’t keeping this from my mom, exactly.”

Jack is so angry he could put a hand through his window, and those things are like double, triple-paned. “You have no idea how hard I’ve been working to keep this from people!”

“Well, you don’t have to, anymore,” Kent says. “You’re free, Zimms. It’s fine. Lighten up.”

Unforgivable!

“Lighten up. Ha! Lighten up. You’re crazy! You think this is some kind of joke? You know what kind of afraid I was that someone would find out, and you just go and tell your mom?”

“Yes, Zimmermann. She’s my mom. What did you think she would do, sell me out to ESPN? Sometimes I need someone to talk to about the things going on in my life. It can really help, you know? You oughta try.”

“I would sooner jump off a bridge.”

“Well, I guess that’s why you were swallowing, like, handfuls of—whatever that shit you were taking was.”

It was a few things. Jack does not name anything, or correct him.

“Look.” Kent sighs. “It’s done, okay? Our parents know. Maybe some other people know. What are you going to do, sit in the house until—May or whatever?”

“Yes.”

“I know you grew up in like, the Haunted freaking Mansion or whatever, but, you’re not gonna want to just sit on your ass stewing for months on end. You’re gonna have to leave _sometime_.”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I get there,” Jack says.

He gets there sooner than he’d like, though, since Kent is still coming to Montreal for the new year and someone’s got to pick him up from the bus station.

First, Jack spends Christmas holed up with his parents, who get him a bunch of books and DVDs. Some new clothes—big sweatpants, big T-shirts, a big hoodie. They’re just shapeless bags, which is annoying, even as his mother makes him try on the hoodie and Jack is shocked at how comfortable it is to not have a zipper straining across his stomach. But, it’s huge, like, for an obese person.

“This is too big on me,” Jack says, wriggling his arms like a ghost.

His mother’s not amused. “You’ll grow into it.”

At the bottom of a tote bag decorated with Jewish stars—his mother stopped ironically calling their tree a ‘Hanukkah bush’ around the time they decided not to make Jack have a bar mitzvah, at which point his parents stopped pretending to even care about that—there’s a pack of boxer briefs with built-in support. He quietly leaves those in the bag.

They don’t cancel their plans to go to Jack’s father’s first cousin’s family’s annual party. Jack whines that he doesn’t want to go when his mother argues that he really should, that he hasn’t seen his cousins in a while, that no one’s going to judge him and he can’t just sit in the house for the next several months. Maybe he’s such a child about it because it hews a little too close to what Kent was trying to tell him.

Anyway, his mother eventually says, “Fine, Jack, fine.” She looks very Christmassy, in a burgundy stain dress and the big sardonyx earrings Jack’s father gave her when he was born. They’re gaudy, and one of the few truly distasteful things she owns. Jack can tell because he doesn’t usually notice or care what his mother wears. “There’s a bag of nuggets in the freezer if you get hungry, and the leftovers—”

Jack ate five cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and then several bagels for lunch. He then promised himself he would never eat again, but as soon as his mother mentions nuggets, his interest is piqued.  Unfortunately, he keeps meaning to ask one of them to show him how to use the microwave, so that he can just have nuggets whenever he wants. His new doctor handed him a nutrition plan, which Jack took one look at and threw in the garbage. He’s been following plans his whole life. He can’t imagine how much it’s going to suck to get back on some degrading weight-loss training regimen.

As soon as his parents are out of the house, he goes into the freezer and gets out the unopened bag. He initially regards this task as fairly basic—he can open a bag of chicken nuggets, sure, no problem. Should he stab it with a knife, or is there, like, a scissors? He remembers seeing his mother cut herbs with a scissors in the kitchen at some point, so maybe there’s one somewhere here, but everything so far away and he’s so hungry and having to go over to the other side of the room would be awful. So he just figures he’ll rip it open with his hands, but his fingers are all swollen and they’re not getting any less so. Clumsily, he yanks at the seam, starting to tear up. How could his parents just leave him here and not even pre-microwave his dinner for him?

There’s no aspect of this that isn’t a nightmare. He would have burst into tears when he managed to aggressively tear the plastic apart and dozens of malformed bits of frozen chicken spilled everywhere—but he’d already started crying. He’s not bending over to pick these up. His center of gravity is off and he’ll probably fall and break his neck, no thank you. He tries eating one, and it’s just impossible. It’s too hard to bite into, it doesn’t taste like anything. His gums hurt as it is. Sighing, he leaves the bag of nuggets in the sink. Maybe they’ll come to room temperate or something.

Instead, he gets the three remaining bagels and a half-eaten tub of cream cheese that’s sitting in the fridge and takes this into the den, where he watches one of his new DVDs and just miserably eats bagels. It’s a documentary called _In The Crease_. Jack would like it more if he weren’t so jealous of everyone in this movie for actually getting to play hockey, instead of crying with half a bagel shoved into their mouths while they spend a lonely Christmas night in oversized sweatpants and the built-in support underwear they got from their mothers. (He will not willingly admit this, but they feel _so much_ better.)

He texts Kent _a lot_. He starts casually, asking whether Kent’s seen this movie. Then he starts criticizing the movie, which is fully a function of his annoyance with himself and not actually indicative of the film quality; he actually knows he’d love this if his life weren’t horrible in every other sense right now. When Kent doesn’t reply to _that_ it’s a quick descent into full-on panicky text message mode, writing shit like _I can’t believe my parents abandoned me, and now you abandoned me too, where are you?_ Jesus, what if Kent’s done with him?

Too much is happening here. He forgets they’re out of bagels and goes back into the kitchen to get another one—but there aren’t anymore, so he starts crying again. He just wants bagels, is that so much to ask? His parents bought a dozen for lunch on Christmas. Why didn’t they buy two dozen? Why didn’t they buy several dozens and freeze them? Jack keeps getting that swishy feeling, but it’s been intensifying over the past week and now it’s more like splashing. Also Kent won’t text him back, and he doesn’t have any pills. So he angrily grabs his cell phone and climbs into his parents’ bed. He doesn’t know why he does, exactly. It’s just bigger than his, a huge king-size, and it looks really comfortable since his mother got all new linens and there are so many cushy shams and a cashmere throw. He curls up in this bed with his phone clutched in his hands and lies awake and staring out at the roof of their garage covered in snow that sparkles in the glow of the white Christmas lights outlining their Haunted Mansion. It does look eerie. Everything he ate today, all five cinnamon rolls and seven bagels, are sloshing around in his stomach, soaked in regret. How could everyone just leave him here like this?

Before he passes out he apparently sends one more text to Kent that says, _I HATE YOU_ , and that’s it. He only realizes he’s done this when his mother wakes him up around midnight and he catches Kent’s crazy string of replies. He sees her earrings before he sees her expression, which is—

“Jack, can you explain to me why the kitchen floor is covered in melted chicken nuggets?”

Jack blinks. “No.”

“I guess they just got there through some Christmas magic.” She rubs his shoulder. “Are you okay?” she asks.

“Fine.”

“Do you want to get up and get into your own bed? Brush your teeth?”

“Not really.”

“Well, where is your father supposed to sleep?”

“I don’t know.”

She groans and stops rubbing his shoulder. “Well, okay, I guess that’s just the level we’re functioning on now.”

Jack would ask, “What level?” but he’s consumed by reading Kent’s texts. It’s really satisfying:

_I’m so sorry! I was doing Christmas_

_Merry Christmas <3 <3 <3_

_Zimms are you okay?_

_Baby I’m sorry, are you okay?_

_Come on, Jack, you know I’m gonna be freaked out if you send me 30 crazy messages and don’t reply_

_My mom says you’re probably just being dramatic but I’m worried, please text me!!!_

Jack writes back, “I’m fine, Merry Christmas.” He stares at the screen of his phone, waiting for the reply. He’s still staring at it when his father gets into bed next to him.

“What are you doing?” Jack asks.

“Your mother and I sleep here,” he says, reaching over Jack to turn out the lamp.

Jack is tired, and he feels somewhat ill, and like his body is some kind of goddamn swing set. No matter how much he wants to not sleep in this bed with his parents, he can’t get up and go back to his room. His body is exhausted but his mind is racing, and he can’t fall asleep until Kent texts him, _Okay, glad to hear_.

It is officially the worst Christmas ever.

~ ~ ~

Kent’s arrival is an overwhelming relief. They make out in the front seat of Jack’s car in the bus station parking lot. This happens because Jack says, “What did you get me for Christmas?” instead of “Hello,” since he’s starving and he figures maybe Kent’s mother sent him with some cookies or gross fruitcake or something. Instead, Kent says, “ _This_ ,” and pulls Jack’s face toward him. He was prepared to be content with stale fruitcake, but this is just great and would be even better if it was something he could chew, swallow, digest. It hasn’t been that long since they had farewell sex in Rimouski, but Jack’s forgotten what it feels like to be wanted, to feel essential to someone other than himself. His dick gets hard between his stomach and the steering wheel.

When Kent pulls back, he holds Jack’s face in his hands and says, “Look at you.”

“What about me?”

“Just, I missed you.” Kent smiles a watery smile and his eyes fill with devotion. “I missed you,” he repeats, like he’s waiting for a reply.

“Let’s get lunch,” Jack says. “I’m starving.”

They end up at a pizza place. Jack gets pepperoni with black olives and garlic.

“This pizza is intense, Zimms,” Kent says. “What the hell.”

Jack would try to explain himself, but, he’s eating.

They make out in the car again. Kent groans, “You taste like pizza.”

They kiss at red lights. They grope each other in the driveway. Kent gets Jack up against his dad’s Alfa Romeo in the garage and sneaks a hand into Jack’s sweats. “Holy shit,” he says, “what the fuck are these underwear?”

“Can we just go inside?”

They sneak up the stairs, praying Jack’s parents aren’t around. They’ve left all of Kent’s shit in the car. Jack has literally never wanted anything so much as he wants Kent to ream his ass like he’s tapping oil or something: deeply, possessively, destructively. Despite this, he’s a little tight and hasn’t done any of the things he usually does to prepare for this, like taking a long bath, or a Xanax thrown back with a Molson and some quiet music. Other guys probably just open up like treasure chests with the right key; this is just one more way in which Jack is super deficient. Eventually Kent quits trying to lick him open and just thrusts against Jack’s stomach and comes all over his body. He sucks the seed from Jack’s tits like it’s all he’s been wanting to do. Then Kent spits it back into his hand and uses it to slick up Jack’s dick while he jerks Jack off. This is layers and layers of sick, but Jack doesn’t care. While they’re doing this his body feels totally still. Nothing’s stirring inside it. He considers depravity a fair toll for a few minutes of freedom.

“Don’t worry,” Kent breathes. He strokes Jack’s stomach like it’s a little lapdog that he wants to shut up. “We can work on this.”

“Like it’s a science fair project,” Jack says, for some reason.

“Exactly,” Kent says, like they’re on the same _wavelength_ and he’s not just agreeing to whichever inanity Jack next coughs up so that Kent doesn’t figure out he’s absolutely point-blank void of any concrete thoughts at this point.

There’s a traumatic day or two where Jack has to endure Kent paying lip service to Jack’s parents’ concerns. His father interviews Kent about hockey like he’s Kent’s agent. He makes Kent rattle off every team his real agent is talking to, every team he thinks he might like to play for, and what kind of offer he’s hoping to get. What makes this weird is that a month ago Bob would never have had these conversations with Kent, because he was too busy having them with Jack.

“I just want to make sure you’re okay, son,” Jack’s father says to Kent. “You’re a hell of a winger but these things are about more than skill. You have to be savvy about things. Life as a top draft prospect is tough.”

“I’m mostly worried about the Ocean-ique,” Kent says in careful French, pronouncing everything like an absolute douche. “I want the Memorial Cup. I’m will worry about the Cup later. Er, I will worry about the draft later. I mean the draft, I want the Cup.”

Bob laughs at Kent. “Your French is getting better,” he says.

“I’m trying.”

“Keep trying!”

“I’ll get it for Jack,” Kent says. His French isn’t usually _this_ bad.

“Oh, son, don’t worry about him,” says Jack’s father. “If you want to win you have to win for yourself. Jack will have his own victories.”

Hearing this makes Jack want to cry.

“I miss playing with him.”

Jack’s father looks at him for a moment. Then he turns back to Kent: “He misses playing with you, I’m sure.”

Jack is curious, but he can’t listen to the rest of this. He gets up and wanders into the kitchen to get something to eat. In the fridge, his mother’s left over half of her plain Greek yogurt with pomegranate seeds and flax. Jack eats the rest of it, scowling, one hand at his lower back. He hopes she didn’t want the rest of this for later.

~ ~ ~

His parents are going to a party, or several parties, around town. Sometimes Bob gets to do things like count down to midnight or light a Christmas tree, but if that’s the case again this year, Jack wouldn’t know, because he hasn’t been paying attention. His mother’s been lecturing him about his plan to sit in the house with Kent and do nothing. She cloaks it in a helpful guise: “Soon you won’t have a lot of energy to do anything,” for example. “Don’t you want to get out now?”

“Where would we go?” Jack asks. Kent is showering, post-sex, and Jack is sprawled in bed while his mother stands over him, hands on her hips. She’s partway through getting ready to go somewhere, in her satin dressing gown but her hair blown out, her foundation applied but no color on her face. She doesn’t seem angry. Scared? Worried, maybe. Well, she’s got cause to worry, Jack figures.

Again, she launches into her list. “You could go out to dinner. You could see a movie.”

“There’s nothing good out. I’m not hungry.’

“Jack,” she says. “Yes, you are.”

“I don’t like restaurants,” Jack insists, which is true—his parents would drag him out to breakfast or dinner or whatever and he would spend the meal slumped in his seat, bored, frustrated, banging on the table. Well, he stopped doing that when he was in grade school, but. He always gets the same few things. Kent has no money, like literally _no_ money, and why should Jack’s parents reward Kent for anything? Staring up at his mother, Jack considers whether he’d be in this mess if it was some other guy. Maybe some decent boyfriend would have made an attempt to save Jack from himself. Kent Parson just calls him “slut tits,” talks about how if Jack’s ass was a Thanksgiving turkey it would be a Butterball (What? What is that?) and there’d be stuffing oozing out of it, and sends e-mails of various cat pictures he finds on the internet, comparing them to other guys on their hockey team. He writes elaborate stories about the cats, sometimes, with much detail about the trouble they get into. When does Kent Parson do his homework? Especially now that Jack will no longer be there to make him do it?

Would some great, real boyfriend have kept this from happening? Jack would like to think so, but then, even if he doesn’t understand the cat e-mails, he likes them. He likes being slut tits. It makes him feel cute. Kent makes him feel like he’s wanted. Conceivably there’s a guy out there who would both make Jack feel wanted and not have made Jack pregnant, but there are too many variables to add up. How many guys would he have to go through to find such a person? The thought of doing that much work just to be happy seems exhausting.

While he’s been thinking about this, his mother’s been standing there. Jack hears the shower shut off, so she probably has, too.

“I’ll leave some cash on the counter,” she says, as if Jack hasn’t got a credit card. “Just promise me you’ll order something celebratory.”

“Celebratory?”

“You know, something fun.” Jack blinks at her. “Because it’s New Year’s Eve.”

“What is an example of something celebratory?”

“I don’t know, honey, that’s between you and Kent. You know, something you don’t eat all the time. Not a pizza. You could order sushi.”

“I can’t order sushi,” Jack says. “I’m not supposed to eat raw fish.” He pauses. “I don’t like sushi.”

“I’m sure you guys can figure it out.” She says this right as Kent comes out of the bathroom, a towel around his waist. “I hope you boys have fun tonight,” Jack’s mother tells Kent. When he doesn’t reply immediately, she adds, “Without getting into too much trouble.”

“Uh, thanks.” Kent looks like he wants to die, which is rare. “Thanks for letting me stay.”

Jack’s mother stands there for a moment. She seems like maybe she’s trying to talk herself into something. Instead, she puts her hands in the pockets of her dressing gown and says, “Happy new year.”

When she’s gone, Kent says, “Shower’s all yours.”

“I’m too tired,” Jack says. He is. That conversation with his mother, and sex before it—it’s a lot.

So he takes a little nap, and Kent indulges him. Maybe Kent doesn’t actually sleep, but he wraps himself around Jack’s awkward body, pressing his face into Jack’s neck. They just fucked so there’s nothing when Jack presses his hips back for Kent’s hardness. It’s just instinctual now, part of the way they fuse together. Kent rests a hand against Jack’s stomach, possessive, gripping it. It’s not fair, Jack thinks as he’s falling asleep, because it’s like a scene from a completely different story. It’s the only time he ever permits himself to wonder what it would be like. He doesn’t think it would be such a bad story. Hockey blogs talk about them already. In some pretty, pleasant world where Jack’s wants are really easy, there’s a cover story about Kent heading off to the NHL and Jack staying home with the baby. This is insane because Jack would sooner have a panic attack then let himself be alone in a house with something he’s supposed to keep from dying. His billet parents gave him an asparagus fern to put in his room, and he killed it. “How?” he remembers them asking. “You didn’t even have to do anything.” They laughed about it like it was a funny joke, ha ha, but the thing is—you can’t neglect a baby _person_. If that dies, there’s no ha ha moment, like fucking it up was cute, _oh Zimms, what am I gonna do with you_? and so on. As he falls asleep he’s conscious of Kent’s hand. He used to sleep with it gripping Jack’s upper arm.

It takes a lot of naps to make it to midnight. Jack isn’t sure why he bothers, except that Kent is clearly excited about this new year they’re about to begin. And why shouldn’t he be? This should be a good year for him. It was supposed to be a good year for both of them, but Jack tries imagining himself twelve months in the future, and comes up with nothing. He could get onto some team’s feeder outfit, potentially. Or he could be pregnant again. He won’t be; neither of those things will come to pass. It’s just a long time. A lot could happen.

Near to midnight, Jack wakes up with his dick in Kent’s mouth. He’s half-startled, half-pleased. Feels good. He’s been on the couch for four hours. All he can see is Kent’s hair. Bits of it are sticking up, as they do. If he weren’t good at sucking cock, Jack would ask him to leave. But he’s pretty good at it, so he can stay.

After some amount of time has passed, Kent pops off Jack's dick for a sec, looking slightly annoyed. “Are you gonna come?”

Jack shrugs, because fuck if he knows.

So Kent slips in a couple of fingers, and Jack does.

“Oh, no.” Kent grabs Jack’s thigh. “Don’t you go to sleep again. I didn’t give you head so you’d go back to sleep.”

“Then why’d you give me head?” Jack asks.

Kent shrugs, because he is exhausting.

Next to the leftovers of one of their three pizzas is a bottle of champagne Kent has brought from New York. When Jack saw Kent pull it out of his bag, he’d asked, “What the hell is that?” Apparently his mother gave it to him. As a present, or something. Jack has met Kent’s mother a few times. She seems aloof to him, though she may be a very pleasant person. Jack assumes Kent has fed her a bunch of stories about him being nuts, or maybe she just sees Jack as a potential pitfall of Kent’s. Had none of this happened, after all, they’d still be fighting for places on NHL teams. Kent mentioned, briefly, that the Las Vegas Aces have been talking to his agent—just a few chats. They’re doing really badly. They probably need a miracle. Jack wishes, as he watches Kent uncork the bottle, that he could be someone’s miracle. What else is he really good for? Nothing without that.

They watch the countdown in New York. Last year they were at a party, too terrified to kiss at midnight. Jack thought about that a million times last January, last February, last March. By April he was nervous that his parents were onto them. (Apparently not; they’d just invited Kent to spend _la fête nationale_ with them because they’re nice. Or, they try to be nice. Whether they thought they were being nice to Kent by including him or being nice to Jack by giving him a friend to suffer through the family vacation with is unclear.) What if they had kissed at that party? Maybe people would have laughed it off, no homo, joking about how their team was destined for victory with a pair of lineys that close.

“Why are we watching this?” Jack asks. His eyes are glazing over. He wants to go to sleep. Kent is drinking from the bottle, tiny little sips. It’s almost cute. Jack’s seen him do that before with champagne. He remembers passing bottles back and forth in people’s basements, tasting Kent’s spit on the rim, laughing like it was all just so crazy, like he wasn’t secretly hoping Kent would see a fucking champagne bottle in his mouth and immediately think about Jack’s lips around his dick. Jack is too full of pizza to even imagine shoving a dick into his mouth.

Kent has no answer as to why they’re watching some foreign countdown. “I dunno.” He sighs. “I like to watch it.” He insists on chanting along with the crowd: “Ten! Nine! Eight! … Zimms? Five—”

Jack clasps his hand over Kent’s mouth.

Kent bites his fingers.

“Holy shit!” Jack pulls his hand away, shocked.

“Happy new year!” says Ryan Seacrest. Jack doesn’t know who that is, but he’s not bad-looking.

“Hey.” Kent’s still got the bottle between his thighs, but he moves it to the coffee table. He grabs Jack’s hand and says, “Happy new year, Jack.”

Kent’s lips are suddenly very near his, while he’s kneeling by Jack’s thighs.

“Kenny,” Jack says, softly. A leg reaches around his body. There are hands on his shoulders. Kent’s a little shorter and their stomachs press together.

“I’m gonna miss this,” Kent says.

“Miss what?”

“Getting on top of you.” Is that romantic? It’s kind of romantic. Kent kisses Jack like it’s supposed to be. So Jack leans into it like he’s supposed to. Kent’s dick—yep, there it is, pressing stiff into his belly. Well, whatever, if Kent wants to fuck him—so long as Jack can just lie there, why not?

~ ~ ~

It's an inauspicious start to 2009: Jack wakes up to Kent’s hand on his stomach, sliding Jack’s T-shirt up to his tits.

There’s movement.

Kent is misty-eyed.

Jack wants to strangle him.

~ ~ ~

For another week, Kent stays with Jack in Montreal. They go skating, which is not something they’ve done together before. They’ve been on the _ice_ together a lot these past two years, but if Jack is being honest with himself, he cannot remember, in the whole of his existence, ever strapping on a pair of skates simply for the pleasure of using a rink as a mean to access another person. Jack’s father has his own rink, and he has skated there more often than anywhere else in his long, grueling life. Last summer when Kent visited, before they went out of town, Bob ran through drills with them in the morning and afternoon. Now, he asks to join them out there. Before Jack can say, “Sure,” not really meaning it, his father senses something and demurs: “Actually, I think your mother wanted my help taking the tree down.” This is such a bald-faced lie that Jack can’t help but feel slightly touched. Jack’s mother will pay some guys from down the street to take their tree away for them. Meanwhile, Jack may be just imagining it, but it takes a bit of effort to get his skates on. Still, he gets them laced up and wobbles onto the ice, Kent right behind him.

“Feels weird to know we won’t be doing this together every day for a while.” Kent is skating backward, his skates gliding each behind the other like he’s got eyes in the back of his head. His front-facing eyes are on Jack, though, who’s uneasy. He hasn’t skated for near a month and while it’s good to go again, he feels like he’s out of alignment. As a corpulent child skating had made Jack feel free, unchained from his body like he’d stepped out of reality and into another world. That’s always been Jack’s feeling about ice skates: they’re a passport to a version of himself that’s unencumbered by his own corporeality. He lost weight as he grew up, never enough yet noticeably so, but skating never changed. It was a forever thing, something that anchored Jack to the present circumstances of his life.

Perhaps that’s why it’s so distressing that he’s having an out-of-body experience trying to get used to the ice again, and Kent is watching this while skating backward, graceful and at ease.

“Do you want a stick?” Kent asks. He’s not wearing hockey gloves, or gear, or anything, just a pair of straight-legged jeans and a New York Giants sweatshirt. It looks old. It might have been his dad’s, or something. For warmth he’s wearing a knit cap and matching mittens. Those look new; maybe his mother got them for him, along with that disturbing onesie.

Jack shakes his head. “I just need to get the hang of this,” he says. “My body can figure this out.”

“Or you can figure out your body.”

“Yeah,” Jack agrees, though he doubts it. “I’m sure.”

They are skating around in a circle, looping around four significant views on every side of the rink:

The copse of pines that marks the beginning of the hill behind Jack’s parents’ property, which plunges down into a valley too sharply to sled;

The evergreen hedge that rings the pavilion where Jack’s parents have built a pool since he’s been away playing hockey these past two years;

The house itself, half archaizing country chateau and half 1980s confabulation, still bordered with dainty lights that burn ceaselessly from Thanksgiving to mid-January;

And a secondary house, the guest “cottage” which has been converted into the garage where Jack’s father stuffs his extra expensive cars. On the other side of that there is a shed of hockey and gardening equipment, but it’s just out of sight from the ice.

It’s cold out, and Jack is sweating.

“Here.” Kent makes a grab for one of Jack’s hands, then the other. For a moment, Jack fears being pulled along. He gets a flash of memory to skating with his father as a baby, being dragged along the ice by someone older, stronger, and better. Before Jack can say anything—before he can let go—Kent lets go of one hand and slides, quickly but elegantly, to Jack’s side.

“So tell me about this shit,” Kent says.

“What shit?” Jack asks.

Kent gestures around to indicate everything, as if he means the whole world. “You know,” he says. “Those trees, what kinds of trees are those?”

“Uh, pines.”

“What kind of pines?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a dendrologist.”

“A what?” Kent asks.

“Tree expert,” Jack mumbles.

“Okay.” Kent appears to think for a moment before he says, “So when was this house built?”

“ _Kenny_.”

“I just think it’s cool. I don’t know anything about, um—”

“Anything,” Jack says.

“—architecture,” Kent finishes, overlapping Jack’s chirp. He takes a deep breath. “We’re a good fit,” he says. “You know such big words, and I’ve got—”

“No, don’t you dare.”

“—a pretty big hockey talent.”

Jack sighs, relieved. “That was shameless,” he says.

“You should try living without shame. Feels better.”

“Than what?” Jack asks.

They skate on, another lap and then another then a third, until Jack grows too tired to continue. Kent never chooses to elaborate.

~ ~ ~

Just before Kent is due back in Rimouski for the next part of the season, Jack gives him a lift. It’s a quiet drive up, during which Kent insists on playing mostly generic pop music, and Jack chooses not to fight over this. They take turns driving, because Jack will have to do it himself on the way back. His parents are trusting Kent to help him move his things out of his old billet. It took quite a bit of convincing on Jack’s father’s part for his mother to agree that this was anything less than a disastrous idea. He hasn’t got that much there: clothes he’s left, hockey posters, the detritus and ephemera of two years in the life of a teenage hockey player. There are school books, the binder of his photo class negatives, the little album of his baby pictures his mother put together when he went away. Jack can’t say he misses his things, or even if he’ll miss his billet family. He won’t miss the town; in comparing it to Montreal Jack cannot believe he has spent two years scuffling around such an empty void, a small place with one redeeming quality, and that’s hockey. He almost feels guilty leaving Kent alone there, until they pull up in front of Kent’s billet family’s house and he gets his hockey equipment out of the car: his bag, his stick, and his expensive pair of skates, the nicest thing he owns. Kent is here to play hockey, Jack reminds himself, reveling in the torture of it.

In the bedroom Jack’s been living in, there’s a stack of game-winning pucks. He handles those and lets Kent pack the rest. When he first arrived with his parents in late summer, his mother had helped him carefully pack his things in black duffel bags. They have been stuffed under his bed ever since, and they are dusty. Kent goes to the backyard to shake them out and comes back with gray hands. He wipes them on his pants and says, “Where do you want me to start?”

With his pucks in his hands, Jack crawls onto the bed. He rests his head against the pillows and the tower of six pucks on his stomach. It rises and falls as he breaths, and trembles atop the swishing. Jack closes his eyes. Maybe if he can keep these pucks upright, everything will be fine.

“Zimms?” Kent asks.

When Jack opens his eyes Kent is standing there with an open duffel, scanning the room.

“Take the posters down and roll them up,” Jack tells him. “Then you can get whatever’s left of my clothes.” It only occurs to Jack as Kent is sitting on the floor folding T-shirts that he won’t be able to wear them for a while. They are mostly from various hockey experiences. He has several Oceanic shirts, a few nice polos his mother bought him, and many giveaways from the various events that have composed his life in the service of other people’s expectations. Kent handles them reverently, neatly. Jack would have guessed that Kent wasn’t a neat folder, had he not roomed with Kent all those times.

From the bottom of a drawer, Kent pulls a Montreal Canadiens Stanley Cup championship shirt. It’s from the late 1970s, soft and worn. Kent holds it taut like a banner. “Can I have this one?”

“Sure,” Jack says. The pucks are still upright on his stomach, thank god. Kent grins like he’s won something, like that shirt really means a lot. Jack struggles with whether to mention that there is a box of these shirts in Jack’s parents’ basement. It’s only special to Kent because he hasn’t yet come close enough to an actual NHL team to understand how cheap and plentiful it all is. Jack has always put up with the inconveniences of professional hockey, in part because he had no choice. It’s impossible for Jack to relate to Americans who come to the Q in search of hockey fame. If Jack could have the hockey and dispense with the fame, he’d be happy.

When the bags are packed, Kent carries them all to Jack’s car. Jack would have helped, but while he was insisting that Kent let him, his billet mom—former billet mom, Jack supposes—overheard and stopped him. “Take it easy,” she’d said, with a hand on his shoulder.

Jack had thought deeply about what to say to this woman. “Will you get another hockey player?” he’d asked.

“I’m not sure the Oceanic thinks we’re a good fit for hockey players,” she’d answered.

So Jack stands on the front steps and watches Kent pack up his car, aware that he has ruined this woman’s ambitions, too. She’d opened her heart and her home to Jack Zimmermann, and all she’d gotten for her trouble was being suspected of deficiency by proxy. In his new winter coat Jack is sweating, overheated. It is freezing outside but his body is just a furnace now, burning fuel to produce warmth with such success that Jack is left tired and perspiring, almost always.

And this tiny woman is standing there in her pressed polyester suit and flimsy cloth flats, no socks.

“Sorry it didn’t work out,” Jack says. He hopes she gets that he blames himself, mostly.

“I am too,” she says. She shivers, and pats him on the stomach. “Take care of yourself. Don’t let this be the last we hear of you.” She doesn’t add anything to the effect of, “Because your failure would be a colossal waste of resources, god help you.” It is, however, very much implied, Jack presumes.

And so Jack spends the ride back to Kent’s billet resenting that woman, and her words, and every desperate night he spent under her roof.

Overnight at Kent’s billet is torture. He’s stepping into Jack’s vacated captaincy, and plies Jack for insight into the position.

“I have nothing to tell you.” Jack is scowling at his slice of plain pizza, wishing it had olives on it.

“That can’t be true.” Kent has finished his first slice of pizza and is now eating the bitter romaine salad that’s come on the side. Each leaf is so coated in Italian dressing that they shimmer on Kent’s fork. “You must know something about being a captain,” he says through a full mouth.

Jack wishes he did. “I’m not a great captain,” is all he manages.

“Zimms,” Kent says, like Jack is nuts. “You’re a _great_ captain.”

“I’m an okay hockey player. People confuse the two. … What? They do.”

“I’m gonna miss you being my captain.”

Jack scoffs. “No, you’re just gonna miss _me_.” He doesn’t believe it.

“And your ass,” Kent adds.

Okay, Jack believes _that_.

When they try to get to sleep, Jack lies on his back, breathing laboriously, deeply aware of how Kent’s eyes are on him. He should sleep on his side but he can’t start right now, tonight—it would require rearranging, and drawing Kent into his needs, and asking for pillows that might not even exist in this house, right now. The very thought of asking makes Jack anxious. He feels as though he’s been lying awake for a while, but when he squints toward the clock on the cable box on the other side of the room, he realizes it can’t have been that long, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. He sighs deeply, unable to help it.

“What are you thinking about?”

Jack is startled by the question. He’s thinking about pills. His pills would have put him right to sleep. So as not to worry Kent, Jack says, “A lot of things,” trying to keep it to a whisper.

“I wish you didn’t have to go. I’m gonna miss you. So much.”

What should Jack do with this information? He can’t stay here. Whatever peace they found together here has been destroyed. Or maybe it never existed in the first place. Does it matter? In the coming years, Jack will spend a lot of time wondering about that.

In the morning, before Jack heads out of town, they have breakfast at a diner. Kent is touchy about the suggestion and Jack can’t figure him out until they’re almost out the door. Kent is wrapping his scarf around his neck, and it almost, but not quite, hides his red cheeks. “You gotta pay for it,” he says. “I don’t—I’m out of money.”

“Sure,” Jack agrees, reflexively, not thinking. He can more than afford Kent’s measly three-dollar breakfast potatoes. He can’t spend another moment around Kent’s billet. It was fine for the night but it’s daylight now, and Jack can’t very well see himself choking down dry cereal while everyone crams around the table gawking at him and watching him eat.

So they roll up to the diner they’ve spent many nights in trying to sober up. Sometimes other guys would be there, but when they weren’t—just cramming into one of the tiny two-man booths makes Jack hard, because he remembers distinctly the feeling of Kent’s foot against his bare calf, or Kent’s fingers light on his shoulder. Before they fell into a full-blown affair it was all over-familiar touches as the thin sauce on the main course of their hockey camaraderie.

This morning Jack’s gums are sore so he orders oatmeal, which he discovers he doesn’t like. Kent shares his ham, his potatoes, and the hard chunks of pale green and barely orange melon that form the basis of his side of fruit salad. Jack can barely chew the cantaloupe, and he must have a pained expression on his face, because Kent scrapes all of his scrambled eggs onto Jack’s plate.

Kent gives him a weak smile. “Gonna miss me?” he asks, reaching over for one last forkful of eggs.

Jack plans to say “no” but when he opens his mouth what comes out instead is a gross sob and, “ _Kenny_ ,” in a gross way, and now Jack is crying and eating eggs at the same time. Kent reaches out and Jack says, “Don’t touch me,” and while it comes out garbled with tears Jack is pleased by how mean it sounds, too.

The expression Kent wears for the rest of the meal is stricken, and when Jack begins to climb into his car, Kent stays put and says, “I’ll walk.”

“Are you sure?” Jack asks, though he is actually relieved.

“I’ll come see you as soon as I can,” Kent tells him. It’s a bad idea because Jack now regrets that they didn’t have sex in the morning.

Jack struggles to say what he’s feeling. “See you, Parse,” is what he comes up with. His face is still hot from crying. It feels weird with wind blowing off the river and onto him directly. The shock of cold on his hot face must be making him tear up again, he thinks as he gets into the car.

It’s not that he wants to stay. It’s too painful for him here, thinking of how he’s utterly blown it. He can’t be around the Oceanic if they lose without him—and definitely not if they win. But neither is Jack eager to drive back to his waiting parents, and a city where not only do people know him if he steps into the grocery store, but where there are often cameras, and people waiting to preserve Jack’s humiliation for posterity. As little as he is looking forward to the drive back, it’s also his last bit of freedom before he’s back where he began. He decides to drive the speed limit and listen to languid country music. That’ll make it seem longer and slower, like he’s got more time to chew things over.

Around Montmagny, Jack gets a text. Against his better judgment, he reads it: _I love you_.

So Jack begins to cry again, and in that moment, he’s consumed with the impulse to text those words back in reply. But he’s _driving_ , so that’s not happening, and when he’s pulling off the road to pee at a gas station he’s too consumed with that to remember. Later, when he opens his thread of text messages with KENNY _/ _/ _/ to let KENNY _/ _/ _/ know that he made it home, Jack sees the text and thinks, fuck. It’s too late to reply with the same, isn’t it? So he writes, “Got home safely,” and he never says it back.

There’ll be other times, Jack figures. Plus, they have Skype sex that night, which is basically the same.

~ ~ ~

In early February, Jack gets a phone call: someone wants to adopt his baby.

It hasn’t been easy, exactly, in part because Jack has insisted on a blind adoption. Adoptive parents, he’s found out, want to know where their child is coming from. They want to meet the parent and they need to hear, first-hand, that once they imprint on this child it’s theirs forever, and whoever gave birth to it won’t appear out of the ether and demand the baby back, or input in the child’s life. Sometimes they want to be able to tell their child something, to answer questions about where the kid came from and why it wasn’t wanted, at least, not by the person who should have wanted it in the first place.

“They can lie to it for all I care,” Jack said at one point. “I never want to see it. Pretend I never existed. I never did, as far as they’re concerned.”

“What happens if your child wants to meet you someday?” Jack had been asked. “What happens if they come find you? Are you going to lie? Will you send it away?”

“Maybe,” Jack had said, unthinking. Sure, why not? He doesn’t owe this baby anything. He’s the one who’s giving up everything to house and nurture it while it grows into something that can survive without him.

Now that Jack knows someone wants it, however, he reconsiders his position. Maybe denying the child is cruel. Maybe turning away from this is inhuman.

But Jack doesn’t know if he’s human. He is flesh and blood, his body as fragile and vulnerable as everyone else’s. Once he’d thought of himself as a machine, playing hockey and running his body to function better on the ice: skate faster, spot pucks sooner, react like some emotionless system that senses danger and issues a warning.

His body failed him, though. It was in danger and it sounded no warning. Something invaded it and no trigger activated to reject that intrusion. His body is just like everyone else’s: conquerable, imperceptive, weak. His brain, though—he has treacherous thoughts. He thinks in terms of strategy, cost, efficiency, improvement. Can he upgrade himself? Can he reboot? Is there any coming back from this? Is there a way to make himself better so that this doesn’t happen again?

Jack tells Kent about the adoptive parents, or rather, that adoptive parents exist and will be taking the baby.

“Oh,” Kent says, like he’s sad. They are Skyping, and Jack can see it: he slumps, looking away. He runs a hand through his hair, trying to smooth it. “That’s great,” he says, his voice as soft and palpable as a fresh bruise.

“What?” Jack snaps. He is tired of dealing with Kent’s apprehension about getting rid of the baby.

“Nothing,” Kent says. “Nothing, Zimms. That’s great. I hope they love—”

“ _Don’t say it_ ,” Jack threatens.

“ _I hope they love our baby_ ,” Kent finishes. He sounds wet. Jack’s never seen him cry before. “Fuck,” Kent cries, wiping his tears from his cheeks. “I’ll call you back, fuck.” Jack sees him slam down the lid of his computer.

Sitting alone in his bed, Jack panics. Not because Kent is sad, and not because he regrets any of this. It’s just—he doesn’t care if the adoptive parents love the baby. It’s got nothing to do with him and he really doesn’t care. The baby is still inside of him, making his life miserable. As Jack stares at his blank computer screen—he’s let it time out now—he’s getting a heel in some swollen organ, maybe a kidney. He’s sitting cross-legged and the fullness of his stomach rests against the tops of his thighs. What kind of person is he if he doesn’t care?

A good person would cry along with Kent, express regret, try to rearrange his life to accommodate the grief he should be feeling. But Jack has no grief, only resentment. Jack can’t even say he’s a bad person. Bad people can be good ones with a little improvement, a change in behavior, a change in attitude. Jack is just a good machine, great at hockey and numb to everything else.

Actually, he thinks, “numb” is also a person’s quality. For Jack to be numb he would have to have feelings in the first place. He isn’t numb, he’s blank. He is neutral. He thinks about Kent’s crying and it just serves to frustrate him. His heart beats so heavily he thinks he might cry, too. He doesn’t want to be like this. He wants to care and he wants to be good.

When his mother asks Jack at dinner that night if he’s okay, he says, “I think I need to be rewired.”

“Do you need to go to a new doctor?” his father asks.

“No,” Jack says. He’s pushing mushroom caps around so that they make a criss-crossed pattern in the olive oil on his plate. It shines when he stares at it.

When Jack looks up his parents are giving each other grave expressions, like they’re worried. But they don’t say anything else to him about seeing someone, a doctor or otherwise, and Jack doesn’t text Kent again until Kent texts him first, later in the week. He says, “Sorry I got like that,” and Jack accepts his apology.

Kent should be sorry. He owes Jack that much.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s been so long since they were together—a full month. Life at home has been okay; Jack’s parents have been very supportive. He finds it annoying. “We just want to make sure you’re comfortable,” his mother keeps saying. He wishes she’d have kept giving him a hard time for getting into this mess, but instead, she just gives him tips on staying cool and hydrated and how to sleep with a pillow between his legs. It’s humiliating, but also, it’s so frustrating. Every time his dad asks, “How are you feeling?” Jack wants to cry. Sure, it’s partly because everything makes him want to cry, but it’s also that he’s ruined his own life and no one’s going to hold him accountable for it. Sometimes Bob asks him if he thinks he wants to go back to hockey.

“Of course I want to go back to hockey,” Jack will say. He tries to play little pick-up games with his dad, but he can barely lace up his skates because his feet are so swollen; one day he can’t get them on at all. He holds his stick out in front of him awkwardly, more jabbing at the puck that controlling it. At first Jack worried that his dad would let him win, but he keeps losing, so now he knows that’s not an issue. It’s cold comfort when he gets so fat he can’t reach the puck anymore, and he settles for skating around the rink by himself, listening to sad country music on a portable CD player and hoping this is good enough exercise, because it’s too hot to run and the ice is cold comfort in a good way.

Every night, Jack and Kent Skype one another. Jack plays with the monitor of his laptop to make sure only his face is visible in the picture, not that his face isn’t also fat. Kent talks about dumb things that happened on the team, or describes highlights from the games Jack’s already seen on TV. Something about the way Kent puts every other player but himself at the center of these narratives is really frustrating. He’s the best on the team, so why doesn’t he just say so? Why can’t he just act it?

Sometimes, Kent will get really quiet and say, “I miss you.”

“No you don’t,” Jack will mutter, looking away.

“I do, Zimms, I miss you all the time.”

“You miss my ass, probably,” Jack will reply, feeling inadequate.

And Kent will blush. He’ll get that predatory look on his face. “Well, yeah,” he’ll say, dreamily. “Who wouldn’t miss all that ass?”

One night, while they’re talking before bed, Kent says, “Is it bigger?”

Jack knows, but he asks anyway: “Is what bigger?”

“That ass of yours. Is it bigger?”

How to respond? “Everything’s bigger,” Jack says slowly. “It’s weird.”

“Is it weird, or is it hot?”

“It’s uncomfortable.”

“Baby,” Kent says, softly. He’s practically gasping. Jack is slightly terrified. It’s not a good look on Kent. He looks insincere. Kind of evil. “Babe, you okay?”

“Not really,” Jack admits. He buries his head in his hands. “I want this over with.”

“Man.” Kent waits a moment, takes a breath. “I was gonna suggest we jerk off, but now I’m just. Um. I feel really bad I did this to you.”

Jack looks up. _Now_ Kent seems sincere. “You didn’t do it to me,” Jack says. “I did it to me. I could have said no, right? I could have had it taken care of. I’m an idiot, you know?”

“You’re not an idiot, Zimms. You’re doing great.”

“I can’t play hockey anymore,” Jack cries. His head falls back into his hands and he keeps crying, fuck. He can’t stop himself.

“Zimms, hey,” Kent says softly. “You’ll get back on the ice. We’ll get you back in the game. We’ll get you down to Vegas with me in no time.”

“I mean I’m too fat to hold the stick right.” Jack looks up, his puffy face all blotchy and wet. “I can’t go to _Las Vegas_ ,” he cries. “It’s so hot there. I’m so hot, Kenny, I’ve never been this hot in my life.”

“Man.” Kent sighs. “You’re always gonna be hot to me.”

“Kenny,” Jack sputters. “Kenny, that was _so bad_.” If anything, he cries harder.

~ ~ ~

Joylessly, Jack watches Rimouski win the Memorial Cup. He’s so thankful he’s not there. There was a spread on him in HELLO! Canada this week with some pictures of his fat ass getting three boxes of fucking doughnuts from Tim Horton’s. They were actually for his mom to take to her Théâtre du Rideau Vert board meeting, but it looks pretty bad, and he’d actually bought two for himself and smashed them into his face as soon as he’d gotten back in the car. For a few weeks Jack had harbored at least a partial sense of peace he’d developed by helping his parents out in small ways, mostly doing errands or trying to clean up little things in the house. They have a housekeeper, but that’s not really the point.

Now Jack is terrified to go anywhere and stuck watching Kent and his team savage their competition. All he can think of is the many Canadian housewives and bored supermarket shoppers looking at pictures of him buying dozens of doughnuts in sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt with a baseball cap over his greasy hair, with a little blurb about how Jack’s team is going to the final and he’s slumming around heavy with Kent Parson’s illegitimate child and apparently carbo-loading. That wasn’t what the article said, but, Jack is reading between the lines here. In a typically nationalistic show of politeness, the magazine has at least gotten in touch with Bob’s publicist, who gave a little quote about how Jack is doing great and excited to watch the Memorial Cup finals. Now that he’s watching it, though, he just wants to pass out and wake up when this is over. Not just the finals, all of it—the summer, the last weeks of gestation, his entire life, sometimes. He can’t sleep through the night anymore because he has to pee every two hours.

When Rimouski wins, Kent calls drunkenly from a bar. There’s cheering in the background. Jack considers hanging up when he realizes this, seeing it as some kind of betrayal, but Kent is so sweet when he’s drunk: “I wish you were here, Zimms,” he garbles, all sodden and sad-happy. “I miss you so much.”

That actually makes Jack angry. “You keep saying you miss me,” he says, so pathetically sober right now. “You always say it but you’re out with the boys, eh? You always say that.”

“I’m not gonna get with anyone,” he says. “I’m gonna come back to you, okay? I’m coming back.”

“You were never here,” says Jack.

“I gotta go, but I’m coming. I’m bringing you the Memorial Cup.”

“I don’t want it,” Jack says, hanging up the phone.

So, Kent doesn’t bring it when he shows up a few days later. He’s got all of his worldly possessions and a big grin on his face. “Holy shit,” he says. “Holy shit, Zimms, you’re huge.”

It’s not what Jack wants to hear. “Okay.”

“Lemme see that ass.” They’re not even in the house yet.

There’s a big hedge around the property, though, and some strategically placed trees. Jack’s parents have always taken his privacy pretty seriously. For some god-forsaken reason he turns around and hikes up his shirt so that Kent can see his butt.

“Holy shit,” Kent repeats. “Holy shit, Jack, it’s beautiful.”

For Jack, it’s hard not to be distressed by how much he wants it when Kent literally fingers him in front of the open door to the house. Jack hasn’t had anything up there for a long time; he can’t reach, and more to the point, he hasn’t been horny in forever, like, actual months. But as soon as Kent’s fingers start playing with his hole, petting it in gentle little strokes, Jack’s suddenly on fire and begging to be fucked. They at least manage to make it to the bedroom, leaving all of Kent’s shit downstairs. “You’re thirsty,” Kent says, tugging off Jack’s shoes and socks. “You’re like, parched.”

“Kenny, ugh.”

“I’m gonna get you so wet.”

“Oh my god” is pretty much all Jack can say in response. Kent is kneading his swollen feet, kissing Jack’s arches, looking up at him with an expression of such devotion and love that Jack just sinks into the bed and groans.

“This _ass_ ,” Kent moans, kneading it, burying his face in it. “I own this ass. I’m paying property taxes on it.”

“Kenny, fuck you.”

“I’m getting routed here, okay, I’m paying for the public schools when I don’t even have any kids.” He looks up at Jack and their eyes meet.

Jack settles a hand on his stomach. “Not yet, anyway.”

“In a month I’ll be the NHL’s top draft pick, probably,” says Kent. “Plus you got that Bad Bob money, so. This one’s going to prep school.”

“This one’s getting adopted,” says Jack. “Put your mouth on me?”

Kent beams and does it, licking Jack open like he’s melting and Kent’s trying to eat it all up before there’s a huge mess on the floor. If there’s anyone on earth better at eating ass than Kent Parson, Jack prays he never meets that man. It would be the end of him. All Jack can see is his fucking stomach; he hasn’t even managed to get his shirt off yet. He’s glad for that because he’d hate to see his tits splayed out before it, primed for a kid he’ll never nurse. Of course, when Jack does get his shirt off, Kent feels him up and sucks one into his mouth, moaning around it like he’s remembering some primal thing that Jack imagines is terrifying. It feels good, though, and his dick is drooling on his stomach, so ready for the next bit: Kent kneels next to him and takes it in his hand, placing the other on Jack’s belly, which he stokes in time with his desperate jerking. The worst part is that as Jack’s coming the fucking baby squirms around, like he can’t stand how Jack’s body is contracting and expanding all around him, involved in some activity that’s got nothing to do with him and centers around Jack, solely: his pleasure, his feelings, his great need. _Fuck you, baby,_ Jack thinks to himself. Fuck you for making a home in my body and trying to evict me from it. While Jack’s thinking this he watches Kent press demented kisses all over his stomach, lapping up Jack’s come so long as he’s down there. They’re not going to talk about how content they both are at this moment.

Instead, they press ahead. Jack has a body pillow and he settles against it, letting his big, tired weight rest while Kent spoons him from behind. Jack whines that he’s overheated, and it’s true that he’s dripping with sweat, his skin sticky and his head swimming. Kent licks it off of Jack’s shoulders while he grips Jack’s ass and barters his way into Jack’s body with payment in filthy little come-ons: “I own this ass, it’s mine _, it’s mine_ , it’s so big I could subdivide it, I could turn it into condos, I bet a family of four could live in here and there’d be room for the in-laws in an apartment upstairs.” What’s weird is that Jack knows this was Kent’s family’s arrangement when he was a kid. Kent seems oblivious while Jack shuts his eyes and presses his face into the pillow and rides the little joys of Kent thrusting against his prostate until Jack realizes he’s drooling and, also, that he’s got to pee again and the fucking’s not helping.

“Fuck,” Kent gasps. His rhythm’s changing, which means he’s about to come. “You want _another_ baby?”

Jack’s got no idea why he cries _yes_ like he wanted the first one, even.

Kent grips Jack’s stomach like it’s a football he’s trying to run into the end zone, like he cannot drop that thing no matter how many linebackers are trying to dislodge it. When he _does_ come he sobs “Zimms!” like he’s fucking dying.

It’s not until a few hours later than Jack is woken up to the sound of rain, Kent’s half-hard cock growing thick again against his thigh, and his mother knocking at the door.

“Not to interrupt the proceedings,” she says, “but Kent, sweetheart, did you know you left your bags outside? Thank god Bob noticed, or everything would have gotten all wet.”

Well, thank god it didn’t! Wet bags, ha ha, so useless. Jack laughs, and both Kent and his mother look at him like he’s crazy.

~ ~ ~

Whatever the virtues of Montreal in the springtime, Jack is a sweaty, exhausted mess and he doesn’t get to enjoy them. He’s never hated his own body so much. Kent has seemingly never _liked_ it so much. His hands are everywhere, all of the time, and wherever his hands aren’t, his mouth ends up. Not to mention—other parts. One afternoon Jack gets a blow job while he eats an entire bag of Haribo gummi bears. He’s never liked gummi bears before, that’s not really something he’s ever enjoyed in particular, but there’s something so calm and systematic about lining up the differently colored pieces in his hand and just staring at them before he eats them, a handful at a time. There’s something soothing about it. “Should you be eating those?” his mother asks. “You know, pregnancy is not a license to just—eat whatever.”

“I don’t know,” Jack tells her, with the _I don’t care_ implicit. She’s always been weird about food.

Anyway, after Kent sucks Jack’s dick while he’s eating some, gummi bears start to taste depraved and he can’t have them anymore. Which is sad, because he liked arranging them. He probably shouldn’t be playing with his food, but he’s bored, and he’s got to do something while Kent works out in the mornings.

“You could run with me, you know,” Kent suggests. “We could do, I dunno, yoga or some shit.”

The prospect of getting any exercise at all is one that Jack finds depressing. He’s afraid to find out what he can’t do. He misses skating—that wasn’t exercise so much as a second, special world for him. His body’s too big and he’s always moved awkwardly, but the ice was like a blessing, like freedom from his own body. If he can’t skate, he can’t be bothered.

At his check-ups he gets grilled on this shit, and he can only meekly supply, “I don’t know” in answer to every question. Finally, his doctor tells him to stop gaining weight. “Heavy birth weight is an indication for diabetes, among other conditions,” Jack is lectured. At the time he feels flippant, because whatever, maybe this makes him horrible, but what does he care? He’s not going to raise this baby. Everything is an indication for everything, so what’s so bad about that? Later, when Kent is trying to get his ass into the pool for some kind of goofy water aerobics, all of Jack’s indifference burns up and he suddenly feels guilty for condemning his progeny to a lifetime of manageable but best-avoided health conditions.

The worst part is that Kent doesn’t contradict Jack when he breaks down and wails that he’s a shitty person and he’s ruining this kid’s health. Instead, Kent pats his back and says, “Hey,” and nothing else. Just _hey_. They’re the most damning three letters to ever come out of Kent’s mouth.

One day, while Kent is having a phone call with his agent, Jack’s mother finds him on the couch and sits down next to him. He’s just lying there, doing nothing, too tired to even shift when the kid starts kicking the shit out of him. Every moment of Jack’s life is an invasion of his privacy now. Fate has never been crueler. Also, his mother is wearing a sleeveless wrap dress and a pair of wedgy sandals, no tights. It’s warm now for regular people, Jack guesses. He can’t remember not feeling overheated.

“Hey,” she says. “Are you busy?”

Jack gives her a look, because—no? He’s not busy? Being busy is for people who have lives, and have things to do, and are needed, and aren’t colossal fuck-ups. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m pretty busy.”

“Oh.” She reaches, and suddenly her hand is hovering over his stomach. “Can I?”

Jack shrugs. “It looks like you’re going to anyway.”

“I wouldn’t touch you without asking. It’s your body.”

He rolls his eyes at her and says, “Go ahead.”

It’s the first time she’s touched him. They haven’t so much as hugged for months. Her face gets—ugh, it gets brighter, like she’s honestly happy. “He’s active,” she says. “An active little guy.”

“Too active.” Jack rests his head against the back of the couch. “How do you make it stop?”

“Oh, honey,” she says. “You don’t.”

“I just want this to be over.”

“Oh, honey,” she repeats. “I know. I know you do. You’re suffering, sweetheart, look at you.”

Jack says nothing to this, because what’s he supposed to say? _I am, thanks_. He stews, and she presses her hand against the jabs.

She tries another tactic. “Kent must be excited about the draft, huh?”

“I dunno, ask him.”

“You think he’ll go first?”

“Hockey analysts think so.”

“You know.” She clears her throat. “You could be an analyst, or do something else. I mean, that’s not playing. Have you thought about coaching? Or some kind of admin job?”

“I’m a _player_ ,” he replies. “I _play_ hockey.”

“I just don’t want you to think you _have_ to. Or get upset if you can’t.”

“Oh, so because I’m pregnant _now_ I can never play hockey again?”

She pulls her hand away. “Look,” she says. “I know you’re miserable now, but believe it or not, it’ll be over soon. And it’s going to take a long time to recover, so I’m not saying you have to figure this out immediately. But you really have to start thinking about—you know, there’s going to be the rest of your life after this. You have to add things up and figure out what you want to do.”

“I don’t want to _do_ anything! I just want you to leave me alone.”

“Okay,” she huffs. “I tried!” His mother gets up off the couch, looking at him. There’s no anger, just disappointment. “You did this to yourself, Jack, you know? You’re very immature.”

“If I’m immature maybe it’s your fault.”

“Maybe so,” she agrees, “and if I made mistakes then I regret them sincerely. But all parents make mistakes. All I did was try my best to raise as happy and healthy a son as I possibly could. You think I wanted to be a grandmother in my early fifties? I’m not going to spend the end of my prime years worrying that every little shred of advice I try to impart doesn’t hurt your feelings. Because everything hurts your feelings, Jack. You never learned to play with other kids. Your only coping mechanism is just—winning. Well, you can’t win all the time, so you’d better figure out how you want to handle it when you don’t.”

“I’d rather die than lose,” he says.

She raises her hand like she’s going to smack him across the face. Of course, she doesn’t, but—for a split second Jack can see that she wants to. “Don’t you ever say anything like that again!”

“It’s just how I feel,” he says, miserably.

“Then for fuck’s sake, Jack Laurent Zimmermann, you need to think about getting some help.” She storms out of the room.

When Kent is done with his call, he spots that Jack is sad immediately. “What’s wrong?” he asks, occupying the spot on the couch that Jack’s mother has recently vacated.

“I had help,” Jack says. “But they took them away from me.”

“Took what away?”

“My pills.”

“Uh, yeah.” Kent pokes his stomach.

“Don’t touch me.” This would be a good time to stalk out dramatically, but gravity keeps Jack pinned to the sofa. Well, gravity and his swollen, awful body.

Silence passes for a moment. Kent’s lips are tight, his brow furrowed. Sometimes, before all of this happened, Jack used to wonder what universal unfairness caused Kent to want to be a hockey player, because Kent is smart and, well, he didn’t _have_ to do this—not in the way Jack has. _Did_. ... Would? Whatever.

Jack can tell that Kent’s been working out what to say when he opens his mouth: “So, uh. Keith said—”

“I don’t care what Keith said. Keep it to yourself.”

Well, now Kent seems hurt. He sighs, and thinks for a moment longer. Jack is just stewing, his anger and frustration filling him past any reasonable point.

And Kent can’t keep his mouth shut: “I really think you oughta consider the swimming. We can go together. It’ll be nice.”

“You don’t want to see me in a bathing suit,” Jack says.

“I’ve been seeing you in your underwear and, like, naked. So what’s the difference? Plus, your parents have a pool in the backyard. It’s not like we’d have to swim around other people.” Kent has been swimming laps. “Sometimes I think you don’t fully get how lucky you are.”

Which is just infuriating. “Lucky? Are you—Parse, jesus, look at me.”

“You look miserable,” Kent agrees. “So, fine. Just think about the swimming. But, also, get dressed.” He hops off the couch. “We’re going out.”

“I’m not moving.”

“Jack, you have to move.”

“I’ll move when they wheel me out of here,” Jack says.

“Okay, now you’re just being ridic. Come on, I’m taking you out for fried chicken.”

Like “fried chicken” is some kind of magic phrase, Jack finds himself getting up—well, Kent pulls him off the couch, is more what happens, but the principle is the same. He puts on shower slides, which are hell on his ankles but he can shove his feet into them, which is the kind of trade bargain he’s making these days. He definitely doesn’t put on new clothes; if a Pittsburgh Penguins T-shirt and mesh shorts aren’t good enough for the people dining at one of Montreal’s lower-quality chicken establishments, then Jack Zimmermann doesn’t need the people of Montreal to support him.

When Jack is sitting in the passenger seat of his car, after Kent has twisted the key in the ignition but before he’s slid out of the garage, Jack says, “Actually, can you go into the house and get my hoodie?”

“Sure.” Kent turns the car off again, unbuckles, and goes back into the house.

Jack passes the time by watching the clock. It’s nearing ten minutes when Kent returns, empty-handed.

“Where’s your hoodie?” Kent asks.

“Uh.” Jack hasn’t been wearing it because he’s been so hot, but now that he’s going out he should probably have it to hide under. He thinks about all the places it could be: in his closet, in his hamper (“You want me to pull a dirty hoodie out of your dirty clothes?” Kent asks, as if he’s suddenly above such a thing), on a peg by the back door (“You mean out to the patio?” “No, by the laundry room”), or maybe it just fell behind the bed or something and is now wedged between the mattress and the wall.

“Welp, okay, lemme see.” Kent leaves the door open when he runs back into the house.

The car is hot, even in the shaded garage—maybe it’s because the air doesn’t move in here. It should be cool, but Jack is sweating. So he turns the car on and blasts the air conditioning. It’s no small feat—reaching requires more effort than Jack really cares to put into this, but, his shirt is getting wet around the neck and under the arms.

He’s sitting there for another fifteen minutes before Kent comes back, the hoodie balled up in his arms. He shoves it into Jack’s hands, asking, “How long have you been running the air?”

“I dunno,” Jack says. “I was hot.”

“It’s like sixty-five out today.”

“You’re going to have to translate that to a real temperature.”

“It’s like seventeen? Or something. I guess? This is awful for the environment, and—okay, I know the door is open, but sitting in a running car in the garage is a little scary.”

That really hadn’t occurred to Jack at all. “Sorry for scaring you,” he says.

“ _Baby_.” Kent puts his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “I’m not worried about me.”

The whole ride, Jack wonders if Kent doesn’t mean, at least a little bit if not mostly, that’s he fears losing the kid. Of course, that would be stupid, because it’s not really Kent’s kid in the first place, in the sense that Kent should be forming attachments to it. These thoughts hound Jack the whole car ride, even when Kent blasts something from his iPod, some dumb song about what sounds, to Jack, like stalking. Jack’s got no idea when Kent has the time to learn all of these lyrics, and were he a normal person he might ask but he’s not sure quite how to phrase it: “You spend all your time with me, so when were you listening to these songs?” Jack doesn’t inquire because it would make him sound a bit too much as if he cares, and actually, he really does not.

At PFK Jack struggles to figure out what he would like to eat.

“Don’t worry,” Kent says, wriggling his splayed fingers like he’s about to work chicken magic. “I got this.”

Jack crams himself gracelessly into a booth and waits. Five minutes later, Kent joins him with a long receipt. “Where’s the food?” Jack asks.

“They’ll call us when it’s ready,” Kent says, surely meaning they’ll call _him_ —Jack is not getting out of this booth, no sir. He’s getting pummeled by what feels like it could be the back of an overlarge head. Neither he nor Kent has what Jack would characterize as an especially large head, so if true, this would be just the most recent in a series of injustices Jack has been subjected to this calendar year.

When, after what seems like too long but is probably only a few minutes and certainly no more than five, their food is ready, Kent fetches it. He comes back with a tray laden with boxes and styrofoam tubs and, holy shit, a freaking bucket.

“What is that?” Jack leans toward it—it can’t have chicken in it, right? That would be nuts. It smells amazing, though. Then, when Kent takes the lid off the bucket, Jack, astounded, asks, “Wait. What, why does the chicken come in a bucket?”

“Zimms.” Kent gets a little smile that Jack would love to lick right off his face. “Have you never been to a KFC before?”

“KFC?”

“PFK. In America we call it KFC. Well, figures your family would be too good for fried chicken.”

“Not too good for fried chicken,” Jack says. “My grandmother used to get it for us when we visited. Not from PFK, another place.”

“Popeye’s?”

“Maybe.” Jack shrugs. He’s too hungry to care, and reaches for the nearest styrofoam bowl. It happens to be full of gravy, which he pours onto his plate.

Kent follows this up by heaping on some mashed potatoes. “See,” he starts saying, in his lecture voice, “when my team lost, and I was very upset about it, my mother used to get me KFC for dinner.”

“I guess you had it a lot, then,” Jack chirps, in between bites of potato.

Shrugging, Kent tosses two biscuits onto Jack’s plate, and dumps on half of their tub of corn. “You looked pretty unhappy.” He pries open the macaroni and cheese. “What happened?”

“Nothing, I dunno. My mom’s a bitch. Can we not discuss it?”

“Well, I guess we don’t have to, but—”

“Thank you,” Jack says, and then “thanks” when Kent puts a leg and some other piece of chicken on his plate. Jack pokes at it with his plastic fork and asks, “What’s this?”

“That’s a thigh.”

“Is that white meat?”

“No, this is all dark meat.”

“Legs are dark meat?”

“Yeah.”

“How come no one told me that before?”

“Because the world is lying to you, Zimms. Because everyone wants you to suffer.”

Jack blinks. “Can I have white meat?”

Kent rolls his eyes. “In addition to? Or, instead of?”

“Instead of.”

Dispensing with the plastic silverware, Kent grabs the chicken from Jack’s plate and dumps it on his own, then reaches into the bucket and gives Jack a breast.

“Sorry.” Jack feels really stupid.

“For what?” Kent asks.

“Taking your food.”

Kent is busy carving his chicken and doesn’t look up. “Don’t worry about it. Dark meat is better, anyway.”

Toward the end of the meal, something occurs to Jack. “How much did this cost?” he asks. He’s been resting his hands on his stomach, but he moves one to try to grab the receipt. Of course, it’s a little too far away, and Kent manages to get it first.

“Never you mind that.” Kent is tearing up the paper into smaller and smaller scraps. “You have to let me take care of you sometimes, you know? I mean, in ways that aren’t giving you undeniably epic pleasure.”

Jack has apparently reached a place where the thought of undeniably epic pleasure makes him want to curl up with his body pillow and take a nap, or maybe that’s the chicken. He ignores that, and says, “I don’t need you to take care of me. I mean, how’d you pay for this? You should let me give you half.” As soon as these words are out of Jack’s mouth, though, he realizes he forgot his wallet. It didn’t even occur to him to take it. Maybe that’s due to how infrequently he’s leaving the house.

Regardless, Kent shakes his head. “I just overdrew my bank account,” he says, casually, like it’s nothing.

“Sounds like a bad thing.”

“Well, sometimes people whose dads don’t have endorsement deals with like Adidas or whatever need to buy fried chicken for their boyfriends, and then we go into debt a little. But it won’t be a problem for me soon, so don’t worry about it.”

“How is that not a problem?” Jack asks. “Look, he just likes their shoes.”

“Same. And it’s not a problem because I’m gonna get my payoff soon, okay? Then I’m gonna buy myself all the Adidas that’ll fit in my closet, and if I have too many Adidas or not a big enough closet, I’ll buy myself all the closets I need. And you can have all the fried chicken you want, and we—you know, one day I wanna do stuff with you that’s not just bumming around, you know?”

“What’s bumming around?” Jack wonders if he shouldn’t pick the little leftover bits off skin off of the chicken bones on his plate.

“You know, like, sitting in the house, hanging at fast food places, hanging in another part of the house. I wanna go places, okay? I had a dream we could spend this time doing something cool, I dunno, like going to Hawaii, or at least going to Miami or something. Don’t get me wrong, I love your parents’ house, it’s nice as fuck, but I like to be out in the world, with the people.” Kent spreads out his arms. Jack knows what he’s trying to say, but it seems like he’s saying the entire world is contained inside the PFK they’re chilling in presently.

“Well, we fucked it up,” Jack says. His back is killing him, and he has to pee like crazy, but he’s worried about getting up because he feels pretty crammed into this booth.

“Just temporarily,” Kent says. “There’ll be other summers.”

“Oh, will there be?”

“Sure, so long as the planet keeps revolving.”

“You mean orbiting.”

“Huh?”

“The planet orbiting the sun is what causes seasons to happen. The earth’s rotation is what causes day and night.” When Kent doesn’t say anything, Jack continues: “See, the globe is kind of on a tilt, like this.” He reaches for a biscuit and promises himself he can eat it if he somehow manages to explain this. He slants the biscuit, then makes a fist with his other hand. “So this is the sun, and because the earth”—he shakes the biscuit in Kent’s face—“is slanted, and because it takes twelve months to go around the sun, the part that’s slanted toward the sun is the part that’s having summer. That’s rotation. But if the planet is always revolving, that means that part of the part that’s having summer and part of the part that’s having winter is always going to be receiving sunlight, which is daytime, while the other half of the planet is not receiving sunlight, which is nighttime.” Jack turns his wrist to rotate the biscuit. “See?”

Kent snatches the biscuit away. “Yes, I know that, we’ve been in the same science class for two years.”

“Well, you got it wrong.”

“Sorry for using the wrong term, your highness. God forbid anyone ever do that.”

“It’s okay.” Jack is unsure if Kent is really angry about this, or just being goofy. “Words mean something, Parse. ... I was going to eat that biscuit.”

Sighing, Kent hands the biscuit over, saying, “But you get my point, right? This won’t be happening next summer. There’s gonna be other chances for us.”

Jack says nothing, eating little sections of biscuit he’s tearing off methodically. Right now, they’re biding their time, and Jack doesn’t feel like there are going to be many more chances. But he nods in tacit agreement and, eventually, lets Kent pull him out of the booth and up onto his feet.

~ ~ ~

The afternoon Jack has his 40-week check-up, they finally have The Fight. It’s a wonder they didn’t have it earlier, Jack figures, but whatever—later, after they’ve both tersely agreed not to apologize to one another and just get on with the rest of it, Jack will blame himself for not being honest with Kent earlier. He doesn’t tell Kent that he thinks he’s got a point. But, Jack rationalizes, he’s the one who’s suffering here. His tits have started leaking, which is delightful. He gets splotches on his shirts sometimes, which humiliates him. He’s back to not sleeping through the night—when he can sleep at all, that is, his heart racing, perpetually unable to relax, annoyed by Kent’s hands all over him and Kent’s snoring and kept wary by his perpetual monitoring for contractions. He keeps getting twinges that he prays are the onset of labor, but when he asks about it at the appointment, the doctor laughs at him. “What you’re describing sounds like muscle cramps,” he says, unhelpfully. “Maybe your boyfriend can give you a massage.”

Kent is sitting in the corner with his arms crossed, but when he hears that he beams and leans forward and says, “Oh god, I give the best massages. I sure could.”

“Uh,” is all Jack manages. His voice hitches and he deflates. He thought he was getting closer, but—not quite there yet. He’s shocked Kent managed to pick that up in French.

“You’re having practice contractions,” Jack’s doctor continues. He’s feeling around Jack’s stomach. “I think your womb position is such that it’s hard to say—there may be some lightening going on, but you’re carrying low anyway, so I’m not confident that would have much impact. What’s definitely true here is that urination may not get any less frequent, so—sorry about that.”

“Thanks,” Jack says, though he’s not grateful and doesn’t mean it.

“Some effacement though,” is the report when Jack’s getting his ass examined. He’s no longer bothered by how turned on this part makes him. It’s pretty much what Kent does most nights, and some mornings and afternoons. Why wouldn’t it? Why anything anymore? “I don’t think I can make any predictions here. The body’s in control. Most physicians would be way off the mark.”

“Thanks,” Jack says again, snottier this time. “So I could go into labor tomorrow, or a two weeks from now.”

“Pretty much,” is the answer.

“That’s good to know,” he says. “Thank you.”

On the way home Jack is hungry, and they stop at a Harvey’s so he can get what it effectively a bucket of poutine and a burger the way he wants it, which is to say, with a lot of mustard and pickles on it, hold everything else. Jack makes Kent go in to order it and he sits in the car miserably thinking about how he should have gone into the restaurant because he’s just realized he has to pee. He then runs into Kent as he’s shuffling into the bathroom. Kent is holding their sack of food and sipping from a cup.

“What is that?” Jack asks.

“A courtesy cup of water.”

“Can you get me a milkshake? I’m going to pee.”

“Sure. What kind do you want?”

“Can you combine Oreo and strawberry?”

“I guess,” says Kent, “though, you know, that doesn’t sound very good.”

“Like I care what you think,” Jack says, because he knows it’s going to be delicious and Kent is just being a baby. To Jack’s great relief, Kent is waiting outside the bathroom when Jack emerges, and he grabs the milkshake and starts drinking it immediately. “Let’s go eat this in the car,” he says.

“Why don’t we just eat it here if we’re not going to take it back to your house?”

There’s no way to even reply to that, because if Kent doesn’t get it now he’s never going to. In any case, Jack sits happily in the car with all of the windows open, eating his poutine and his burger and drinking his milkshake while Kent gazes sadly into the bottom of his empty courtesy cup and sighs a lot.

“What?” Jack asks, through a mouthful of poutine. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m worried.”

“About me?”

“No. Well, sort of.” Kent sneaks a sip of Jack’s milkshake before he continues: “I realize this is a longshot, but. If you go into labor during the draft I’m going to have to miss it. And I think they’ll still draft me? But it’s an inauspicious start to my career, you know?”

“Don’t even worry about that,” Jack says. “I don’t want you there anyway.”

Kent blinks. “Uh, what?”

“I don’t want you there when I deliver. So, just. It’s fine. Go to the draft. If they overlap.”

“Wait,” says Kent. “You don’t want me there? Of course I’m going to be there.”

“No you’re not, Parse. You really think I want you watching that?” Jack has to say this in between swallows of his milkshake. “The whole thing is bad news.”

“You can’t shut me out of the delivery, can you?”

“Oh, you bet I can. It’s gonna be gross, eh? You don’t wanna watch anyhow.”

“Of course I don’t want to watch you, you know, push a kid out, but—why wouldn’t I be there? It’s gonna suck, Zimms, don’t you want me there? To comfort you and shit?”

“Not especially,” Jack says. “The greatest comfort to me would be having no one there at all.”

“Well, what about the kid?” Kent asks.

“What about it?”

“If I’m not there, when do I get to see it?”

“Who said you got to see it?”

Kent is horrified. “We gotta, you know. _See_ the baby!”

“We’re not keeping the baby, so, no? I’d prefer to just—let it happen, move on.”

“Jesus,” says Kent. “Jesus, you’re a freaking sociopath.”

This hurts Jack’s feelings, actually, and suddenly the hunk of burger he’s just bitten off tastes less palatable. He chews it slowly. He swallows. “I’m not a sociopath. We were never keeping it.”

“It’s our _fucking baby_ ,” Kent hisses. Jack has to admit that he sounds audibly distressed. “I don’t want a fucking kid, Jack, jesus. But, oh my god, it happened! We made one, okay, and I just—I wanna see it.” Kent’s voice becomes very small: “I want to know what a baby that’s made out of both of us looks like. I want to see what’s been in your body this whole time.”

Jack has to finish chewing and swallowing what’s in his mouth before he says, “Well, I don’t want to see it, I don’t want you to see it, and I definitely don’t want you to see me _like that_.”

“So, you’d rather I just sat at home and thought about you being in pain all day.”

“Yes,” says Jack. “I’d rather that.”

“Than being there to comfort you?”

“How many times do I have to say it?” Jack asks. “Your presence isn’t a comfort to me.” This sounds so bad even to him that he winces, and amends it to: “It _wouldn’t_ be a comfort to me, in that situation.”

“Why are you shutting me out?” Kent asks. He looks crazy.

“Why did you ruin my professional hockey career?”

Kent explodes: “I did not ruin your professional hockey career! You’re the one who sat on your fat fucking ass waiting months and fucking months—”

“Don’t call my ass fat,” Jack interrupts to say.

“Sorry,” Kent says, “but it is! It’s fucking enormous!”

Jack can’t deal with this. He wishes he had meds with him so he could swallow a few with his melting milkshake and pass out in the car on the way home. Actually, what would really do it for him right now is three Klonopin and a swig of vodka to wash it down. That would do the trick. But since he’s pregnant he can’t put garbage into his body if it’s actually going to help him, or make him feel any better. He’s still pretty hungry, though, and so he shoves a forkful of poutine into his mouth.

“I hate that your car’s gonna smell like gravy for a week,” Kent says, turning the engine.

It takes Jack half of the ride home, and finishing the rest of his food, to say anything. “Sorry about the car smelling like gravy,” he manages. “Also, you didn’t ruin my career. I did. I know that.”

“You can probably get back into it after,” says Kent, joylessly. “That’s the plan, right?”

“Maybe.” Jack shrugs. “We’ll see.” The baby has been quiet lately, settling into his new position Jack supposes, but on this drive he’s been squirming around, probably trying to punish Jack’s bladder for filling up again and encroaching on his space.

They don’t talk until they’re back at Jack’s house, shooting one another suspicious, meaningful looks but saying nothing.

“Oh,” Jack’s mother says, catching them slam through the front door as she’s tying a wobbly pair of espadrilles up her ankles. “Did you boys get milkshakes?”

“No,” says Jack, trying to hide the cup he’s holding.

“Jack did,” says Kent.

The comment only serves to enrage Jack, who holds it together until they are back in his—their?—room, where he slams the door and begins shouting at Kent, “Why did you have to do that?”

“Do what?” Kent asks. “Tell your mom you got a milkshake? You were holding the cup, Jack.”

“It’s none of her business what I’m holding, and you don’t get to tell her!” Kent opens his mouth to respond, but Jack is quick: “And don’t you make this into something like, I should tell my parents things because they care about me, or, I shouldn’t be drinking milkshakes and this is about my health. You were just being a bitch!” Jack falls onto the bed and starts crying, partly because he is upset but mostly because everything makes him cry now, for no reason and for good reason, over issues of great and little consequence, when justified and not, when he has been hoping for hours that someone will give him a reason to cry.

“Okay.” Kent sits on the bed. “Okay,” he repeats, trying to pat Jack on the back.

“Don’t touch me,” Jack cries, and Kent recoils somewhat.

“Look,” Kent says, and there’s exasperation in it.

“Leave me alone,” Jack sputters. “Leave me alone, I fucking hate you.”

“No.”

Jack stops crying for a second, staring at Kent’s defiant stance, his hands on his bony hips and his hair all sticking up like it does when Kent hasn’t tried to slick it down and hasn’t been wearing a cap.

“I’m not leaving you,” Kent barks. “Are you fucking insane? What kind of person leaves this?” He points at Jack, his eyes flashing with some kind of crazy determination.

Jack fills with a mix of sensations: anger, shame, pathetic need. His face gets hot and he starts crying again. His baby is kicking the shit out of him, and it hurts, and his back hurts, and his head hurts, his tits are kind of leaking these days, and he’s hungry even though he just ate nearly a full bucket of poutine, and then some. He has to urinate, too, like, too much is happening. Too much is happening, and why can’t Kent understand that? He opens his mouth to try to explain, and gets past, “I—”

Then he quits, because he can’t conceive of any explanation for how he feels.

Worst, Kent just stands there with his hands on his hips for a few minutes, seething, practically hyperventilating himself. Jack looks away, and so it catches him off-guard when Kent says, “Just stop fucking acting like you fucked up so bad no one wants you. I’m here.”

Without thinking, Jack garbles, “Maybe that’s the problem.”

“What?”

For a moment Jack isn’t sure if this is an angry response, and worries over how Kent might reply. But after a moment it’s clear that Kent actually just didn’t hear.

~ ~ ~

Kent has to go home to see his mother, who’s been bugging him about it. He makes a big deal about not wanting to leave Montreal, about not wanting to leave Jack. But he has not seen his mother since December, and he has to be back for the draft at the end of the month. If he wants to go, he ought to go now.

Jack makes a big deal about being fine with Kent leaving. “Go see her,” he says. “You’re not missing anything.”

“I’ll miss _you_.”

“I’ll be fine, eh?”

Kent looks at him with awful contempt.

“Yeah,” Jack says. “I’ll be fine.”

~ ~ ~

Jack is not fine, exactly. He is overdue by every conceivable measure. With Kent gone his mother drags him to the doctor. He’s got appointments scheduled in advance and he still resents it.

“We’re going to have to talk about induction,” Jack is told. “How long did you say the father will be away for?”

“Three days,” Alicia says, when Jack fails to answer.

“We can wait until he’s back.”

Jack is surprised that he waits a beat before saying, “Do it now.”

“Honey,” says his mother. “Are you _sure_?”

Not really, but maybe if Jack says that, they won’t take him seriously. “I’m sure. You can do it now.”

It’s no surprise that Jack ends up with his doctor’s hand stuffed up his ass, “stripping the membranes,” whatever that means. He’s beyond processing any explanations. He figured they might use medicine, but, apparently not. It’s not a pleasant experience, but he’s sustained hockey injuries that were worse, even if this is admittedly different and kind of scary. It’s over soon enough, though, and it gets him to the finish line more quickly, it’s worth it.

Then they send him home and tell him to take it easy.

Jack stares at his mother in disbelief. “I thought I was going to go to the hospital.”

“Not until you’re in labor,” his doctor says. “Hopefully that should get it going within the next couple of days. If not we can try something else.”

There’s no conceivable benefit to all of this waiting, Jack figures. When it’s time to get up and go, he secretly prays they’ll offer him a wheelchair or something. No such luck—he has to drag himself to the car, feeling so drained and uncomfortable and so, so annoyed.

“It’ll be okay, honey,” his mother says. She helps him get his seatbelt buckled, because he’s not going to do it himself. It’s hardly worth the trouble. The worst that could happen is he dies in a car crash.

Instead, he gets home in one piece and collapses on the couch. He texts Kent, “They tried to induce labor,” maybe just out of habit. He wishes he hadn’t when Kent writes back, _!!! holy shit_.

“Nothing’s happening,” Jack writes. “Don’t get excited. Could take a few.”

_A few hours?_

“A few days.”

 _Baby_ , Kent texts back. _I wish I was there_.

Jack doesn’t reply.

 _How do you feel?_ Kent asks.

It must be a bold attempt to get Jack to reply to him, because how does he _think_ Jack’s feeling? Like a _big swollen tired uncomfortable frightened mess_ —so, the same as he was the day before when Kent left town. What a stupid question. What is Kent thinking?

~ ~ ~

For once, something in Jack’s life goes better than expected: he’s not hungry for dinner, falls asleep instead of eating, and wakes up hours later in serious pain that flickers out pretty quickly. Perhaps ironically, the only other time Jack can recall being so delighted to hurt was after his first time going all the way with Kent. That was some pretty good pain, though it was more like a gentle soreness. Had he not had that membrane stripping or whatever earlier in the day, maybe he’d have chalked it up to more preparatory contractions or more general, overworked soreness. But, nope, this is the real deal. Jack can feel it. He can tell. He falls back asleep telling himself his suffering is almost over, that he’s at the beginning of the end of things. It’s a good feeling.

He manages to half-doze, in and out of the world, semi-conscious of contractions when they happen until he wakes up around 6, desperate to pee. He struggles to do that, yet somehow no longer minding the difficulty. He gets back in bed and texts his mom: “It’s happening.”

He expects her to get him going immediately, and is shocked when it takes her another hour—that’s quite a few contractions—to come see him. “Great,” she says, sitting on the edge of his bed. “What a relief.”

Because he rarely knows what to say, Jack often stares at people, and hoping they’ll speak first. Today Jack has no patience, and he won’t enjoy even a beat of awkward silence. So he asks, “Are we going to the hospital?”

“Eventually,” she says. “First you have to make absolutely sure this is happening, and then you have to make sure the contractions are coming close enough that things are actually progressing into delivery.”

“What happens if they aren’t?”

“Well, then you go out of your way to get to the hospital and they send you home.”

“Oh.”

“So,” says his mother. “You tell us when you’re ready.”

At this point, Jack errs. Instead of asking, what the hell does that mean? he says, “Oh, okay,” and assumes he’ll just somehow know, instinctually, when he is ready.

His mother gets up. “Can I get you something? Are you hungry, or…?”

“Kind of,” he says, though he’s actually starving.

“That’s good. You’ll need the energy.” She brings him a plate of chicken nuggets and a smoothie. She puts this stuff on his desk and helps him sit up, stuffing pillows behind his back and holding the glass up so he can suck at the straw without too much effort. He’s conscious of how babyish and stupid it should feel, but juxtaposed with everything else, it’s hard to muster up enough shame to ask her to let him fend for himself.

It’s a good smoothie, and it tastes of mango, pineapple, and banana, the nonfat vanilla frozen yogurt his mom keeps in the freezer when it’s summer, and maybe something else—orange juice? _  
_

“That’s good,” she says, sweeping his hair back. When he seizes up in discomfort she puts the glass down and braces him, saying, “It’s okay, Jack. It’s okay, it only lasts a second.”

Actually, it’s lasting longer than a second; each one is getting a little longer and little worse, imperceptibly enough that from contraction to contraction he doesn’t notice but thinking back to contractions from a few hours ago, the difference is acute. Then again, this is taking forever.

When one’s just passed and the next hasn’t begun to build yet, Jack asks his mother, “How do you get through these?”

“How did _I_ get through them?”

“How does anyone get through them?” He holds his hands open and she places a shapeless nugget in them. It’s still slightly warm.

“You get some painkillers when you get to the hospital,” she says. “Maybe you want to take a bath? Generally I guess people think about getting to—you know, the baby. But just getting through it, eh—maybe you want to focus on that?”

“I’m trying,” Jack tells her.

“Do you want Kent to come back? We can buy him an actual plane ticket—”

“No,” Jack says, startled at the quickness of his response. “No, just, he’ll be back soon. It’s fine.”

“Okay.” For the first time in months, she kisses him. It’s just on the forehead, but he needed that. He feels lighter in an instant. Sadly, it only _lasts_ an instant, until the next pang begins to mount and he has to shut his eyes and pant through it.

The experience passes slowly, blurs together, melts from midmorning into afternoon.

Sitting miserably in his own bed, Jack grips his phone in his hands. Kent’s been texting him: _Any news?_ Jack knows he ought to share, but every time he starts to type out the words, “Yes, I’m in labor,” he feels disgusted and puts his phone aside and begins wallowing in self-pity. He’ll wait a few minutes until his body seizes up in pain, and he’ll start tearing up because it sucks, and he’ll grasp for his phone and clutch it for dear life. He’ll start drafting the message in his head: _This hurts more than anything has ever hurt, and it’s lonely, and I need you. Please come back_. He’s supposed to be counting, or something, but he’s not. Instead, he pants through the end of each contraction until his desperation subsides and he considers, again, whether to just text, calmly, that this is happening. Then he’ll push the phone away, and then the whole thing will start up again. The thing is, though, they keep getting worse.

His mother and father come in to check on him at various points. “Do you need anything?” his dad asks.

What Jack really needs is for his father to stay away from him until this is over. So he says, “No, thank you,” as politely as possible.

When his mother next sees him and asks if he’s okay, he says, “Please do not let Papa come in here, I am begging you.”

“Okay,” she says, sitting on the edge of his bed. “I won’t, I promise. Where are you at with counting?”

“I’m not counting,” Jack says.

She puts her head in her hands. “Oh my god,” she says. “Okay. All right. Well, I can help.” So she helps, counting while he rides out the next one. She holds his hand like he’s a child. “You tell me when.”

They count through a few cycles together.  She keeps glancing at the clock. After a few have passed, she asks, “Your, uh, water hasn’t broken?”

Jack shakes his head.

“Well, these are pretty close together—I think someone should call.”

“Will you do it?”

“Sure, Jack. I’ll do it.” She picks up the empty water glass next to his bed. “I’ll be back,” she says quietly, kissing him again before stepping away.

More than Jack is tired, and bored, and in pain, he is terrified. What if this never ends?

His mother comes back in a few minutes, though. “We should get going,” she says. “See? Things are happening.”

“Thank god,” Jack agrees.

“Did you pack a bag?”

Kent did, Jack tells her. He has no idea what’s in it. He hopes it’s just books and T-shirts and not, like, creepy random sex stuff. Surely, Kent wouldn’t—no, he wouldn’t, would he? Maybe Jack dwells on this because it’s a nice distraction from the pain.

When Jack is in a room and his mother rifles through the bag, it’s worse than sex stuff. Yes, mostly big T-shirts, but also, she finds a note. “Do you want to read this?” She proffers it to him so that Jack can see his name scrawled on the envelope in caps: _ZIMMS_ , so damning.

Jack opens it with trembling fingers.

What’s inside is a child’s birthday card. It keeps getting worse: a cartoonish little boy, dressed in hockey gear, with the words, _BONNE F_ _ÊTE_ _À TOI_. Jack tucks his thumb into the card, about to open it. He pulls it out. He can’t do this.

“Mom,” he says. “Can you—?”

From where she’s sitting on the edge of his bed, she cocks her head at him.

“I need to be alone.”

“Oh,” he says quietly. She pulls her hand away from his stomach, where it’s been resting.

He needs her to get out of here before the next wave hits. “I have to do this alone.” He hands her the card. “Will you take this with you?”

“Sure.” She takes it from him, along with the envelope.

“Don’t show it to anyone.”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

“Can you throw it away?”

She gets a weird look on her face, like she’s sad. “Sure.” Then she just stands there.

“Can you go?” Jack grits out.

He shoulders slump. “Well, uh—” It’s like she’s searching for words, playing with her long hair and worrying her lip. Jack is about to yell at her again when she says, “Good luck with this,” some edge to her voice. Then finally, _finally_ , she leaves Jack alone. She tosses the card in the trash on her way out of the door.

Or, as alone as he’s going to be. His “membranes” have already been “stripped”—now they’re “ruptured.” A nurse who holds his hand through this procedure tries to explain what’s happening, but Jack doesn’t care.

Does Jack want an epidural? He won’t feel any pain down there. Sure, he’d like that. Make all of this go away? Sounds great to him. “It can prolong labor,” he’s told. Labor’s been happening for the whole damn day already. Jack _really_ doesn’t care. How much longer could it get?

Every time anyone comes into the room, they tell him to stop pushing. They don’t understand—he _has_ to. He absolutely does. It’s like nothing he’s ever felt before, stronger than a compulsion. His body is both forcing him and doing this on its own. “You’re going to tire yourself out,” someone says. This person clearly doesn’t get him. He doesn’t tire out! He’s played games of major junior hockey that went into two extra periods. That’s all this is, he thinks. He’s just gotta keep playing. The longer he plays the more he gets away from his own body.

So Jack waits and waits and waits and pushes and pushes and pushes and pushes and screams for good measure, and in the end some intern floats by and tells him to stop and that they’re going to do a C-section. He cries, because he didn’t want this baby in him in the first place, and now he can’t manage to get it out.

“What’s your name?” he groggily asks the woman who’s fiddling with his IV, prepping him—it could be a nurse or a doctor or just some random nobody; Jack is so over this, he’s so done.

“Clare,” she says.

“Clare with the assist,” is the last thing Jack remembers saying. He forgets that he laughs at his own joke.

~ ~ ~

He wakes up with a tube plugged into his dick and gauze taped to his stomach, but even under those bandages, he can tell he’s still fat, probably just as fat as he was before. It’s a little disappointing, and so the first thing Jack asks the nurse who’s checking his vitals is, “Why am I still fat?” It comes out all slurry, shocking him.

And she just laughs, and scribbles something, and says, “Oh, honey—it’s your first, clearly.”

“My last, if I can help it,” Jack insists. He passes out again shortly.

When he is up again it’s a new day. Same bandages, still fat. No tube, and his mother is sitting next to his bed, petting his hair and staring at her phone. He stirs, and she says, “Oh. Oh!” She puts the phone down on a little table, next to a pretty gaudy bouquet. It’s about a zillion full-bloom roses. They’re various shades but mostly ice blue. “They’re from Kent,” Jack’s mother says, when she notices him looking. “Do you want me to read you the card?”

“I want pain meds,” Jack replies, trying to lift his head up. He’s groggy and his entire body feels like it’s about to bleed.

Jack’s mother reaches over him and hits a button on a remote control that’s lying near his side. The Royal Vic building is like a castle, but from his room all Jack can see is some mountain and some parking lot.

“Where’s the baby?” Jack asks. “Did you see him?”

His mother nods. “Papa and I went to the nursery—he’s robust! Did you want to—”

“No, I don’t. Please don’t tell me.” Jack tries to find some judgment in her reaction, but she just nods, smoothing his hair out again.

“You need a brush,” she says, and her voice is _so soft_. It’s painful to hear. “You sort of need a shower, too.”

“I can’t get up.”

“In due time, I guess.”

“This hurts so much,” Jack says, just as a nurse arrives with a booster for his IV. There’s so much happening right now, in his body—the incision is throbbing, but every organ feels damaged, his throat is sore from screaming, and it’s been so long since he’s laid on his back that his muscles are protesting, as if they don’t know what this position’s supposed to feel like. That all fades away, or at least, it ceases bothering him very much in due time.

His mother chats idly to him about various goings-on he’s missed, none of which he cares about—some developments in the French plane crash investigation, and some new iPhone is out. “You should get a new phone,” Jack’s dad says when he comes by after lunch. He picks up Jack’s mother’s and seems to glimpse at his own reflection in the screen. “Would you like a new phone?”

“I don’t care,” Jack says. “I don’t care. Why won’t you let me sleep?”

“Poor guy,” says his dad. “You’re pretty tired, huh?”

Jack curses in French, which he almost never does. It makes his father laugh at him. “You’re gonna tough it out, of course,” he says, warmly. “Get some rest. It’s not easy.”

 _What the hell would he know about it?_ Jack thinks to himself.

On the second day of Jack’s recovery, Kent comes to see him. “Your mom said I should swing by,” he said. “She said you were up for visitors.” Jack is furious that Kent didn’t come yesterday, and furious that he’s here now.

Kent is wearing a new button-down shirt over his old board shorts. Jack gets a sense memory of them wedged up in a roll against his thighs while Kent fucked him last summer. Back then, Kent would never have worn a button-down shirt voluntarily, for any reason. But he looks good in it, a little more adult. It’s only been a week, but this must be deliberate, and so it’s startling.

“Why did you even come back here?” Jack asks. “You should have just stayed with your mom, since you love her so much.”

“Are you pissed I went out of town? Because you said you didn’t want me here.” Kent drags over a chair that’s sitting in the corner of the room.

“No,” Jack lies. “I’m glad you left.”

“Jesus, Zimms, you don’t have to be an asshole.” He sits down, gripping the wooden arms of his chair. “I can’t imagine what it was like. How much it must have—you’re really strong, you know?”

“No, I don’t know.” The truth is, this whole experience hasn’t made Jack feel strong, but just the opposite: as if he’s a small, struggling person, suffering despite his best efforts to avoid it, jostled about by everything from other people’s whims to his own biology and never making his own choices. So he feels like shit, actually, but Kent doesn’t need to know that. So he says nothing, just stares at Kent, waiting for him to do something.

“I want to tell the Aces,” Kent says quietly. It’s almost a whisper, but not quite. “Before they draft me, I want to tell them that—I mean, how I feel about you. I’ve been thinking about how to make it up to you. I don’t feel like this is some random thing that happened. This whole thing sucked, you know? I want to feel like it meant something and—I want you to know that you mean something to me. I mean, not something, just like, everything? I was going crazy, not being with you, and I just really, really, want to do this. It would be scary? But I don’t want you to feel like you’re something I’m hiding or that I just stayed with you because I felt guilty. I mean—”

Jack is not sure why he’s listening to Kent babble mindlessly like an idiot, but he does. It’s a little sad, he thinks. Also, a little horrifying; the last thing on the planet he would like is for Kent to go mouthing off to the Las Vegas Aces management about how they’ve been fucking.

“—if you came to Las Vegas,” Kent finishes.

Well, that’s weird. Jack hasn’t quite caught the end of whatever Kent was saying. “You want me to come visit you in Vegas?”

Kent is now as pink as Jack’s ever seen him. “I want you to move with me to Vegas,” Kent says, swiftly.

Jack takes a deep breath. “I don’t want it like that with you.”

“Like what?” Kent asks.

“Like you’re the father of my child and you want to marry me.”

Kent laughs, probably because those words are absurd to the point of hilarity. But Jack is on drugs and still floating through this experience on a cloud of partial confusion, plus all the other stuff that’s happening, so if the things that spill out of his mouth are a little stupid, well—whatever. But Kent’s not cruel, at least, Jack doesn’t see him that way. It makes him sad to think that they’re both in pain, even while Jack knows his pain is the superior pain.

“What did I think was going to happen?” Kent asks himself, quietly. “I guess I thought we’d end up on other teams and do some—some long-distance thing. Maybe we’d break up but then we’d play each other and get it on in some swanky hotel room. Or, maybe I thought we’d spend the off-season together? There’s so many places I’ve never been. I wanna go to those places with you, you know? Nice places. Places for like, classy people.”

“Classy people,” Jack repeats.

“Yeah, classy,” Kent agrees. “With a K. For Kent Parson. _Klassy_.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“For saying klassy with a K?”

“For thinking I’d want to go to Vegas with you,” Jack says. “For treating me like I’m done.”

“I don’t think you’re done!”

“Parse, you listen to me,” Jack says. If it comes out a little mean, maybe it’s the pain of his incision breaking through the drugs—that must be it, yeah, because why else would he snap like that? “This doesn’t mean anything. I fucked up, things are fucked up, but I’m gonna get back into hockey, okay? I’m gonna get another chance, and when that chance comes, I need to be here, not languishing in freaking Las Vegas like I’m done. I don’t even know why Las Vegas has a hockey team. You can’t skate outside there, can you? That’s where tapped-out players go to die.”

“They’re gonna fucking draft me,” Kent says. “Maybe it was like that before, but I’ve been talking to the GMs, the GMs have been talking to my agent, and they’ve got plans. I don’t have to play there forever but they’re gonna draft me, and you’re fucked up on whatever, so maybe you can’t see what’s happening here, but I’m going. That’s what’s gonna happen. They’ve got the first pick and they’re picking me. What do you think would’ve happened if you were in the draft? Then it would be you, Zimms. Then _you’d_ be going to Vegas.”

“Maybe.” Jack shrugs. He needs some more painkillers, he’s sure of it.

“So if you went with me it would just be like—rectifying things. Putting things back the way they were gonna be in the first place.”

“But, to do what? I don’t think any NHL team is considering me part of their plans right now. Just, look at me.”

“Yeah,” Kent says, quietly. “I see.”

After that, miraculously, Kent shuts up. After sitting there, cold and silent, for a moment, he reaches out with an open hand.

Jack studies it carefully. Kent’s hands are beautiful, expressive and strong. They’re good for hockey, but they aren’t really a hockey player’s hands, at least, they look nothing to Jack like his own, or his father’s, or anyone else’s Jack has ever watched. He wonders if it’s because they are attached to someone who makes Jack feel like, often simultaneously, both the most important person in the world and utterly the least. He reaches out for the hand that’s being offered to him. It feels good, actually. He missed Kent’s skin against his own.

Then Kent opens his mouth, saying, “You know, I really—”

“Shut up,” Jack says. “Don’t say it. You can stay here if you don’t talk.”

“Okay, fair enough,” Kent says.

“ _Don’t talk_.”

So they don’t, and nothing is resolved. Jack falls asleep with his hand in Kent’s, and he only wakes up to get his IV topped off, when a nurse comes in and says, “Excuse me,” shoving Kent out of the way. He probably hasn’t been sleeping for very long, maybe a few minutes. When Kent lets go of his hand he feels stressed out for a moment, really anxious. But then the drug kicks in and Kent’s presence, or not, turns once again irrelevant.

~ ~ ~

Looking back, years later, the blue of that early June is smeared across Jack’s memory like something on the windshield of a car the wipers can’t quite get off but which no longer looks like itself. From that distance, it’s easier to say things just stopped. Kent was going to be drafted, and go to Las Vegas, and Jack wasn’t. That’s what Jack feels when he thinks it over—when he tries to make out that original shape through the slightly convex glass pane of his memory. That’s the ending that makes sense to Jack, the one he wants to live with.

The truth is a little harder to sketch out: It doesn’t end all at once, or even quickly. It dies so slowly that Jack doesn’t realize he’s in a dying relationship, even as he’s not sure that’s what’s happening here. No good paradigm fits them. They can’t be boyfriends, not when Kent is hours away by plane and he can’t openly date a guy. “The father of my child,” Jack says aloud one day, sadly studying Kent’s picture on the Aces’ website. But Jack deeply feels he has no child, that the baby his body nurtured is someone else’s child now, and Jack is still certain that if that someone else offered the baby back to him, Jack would look at it with revulsion and say “no” and turn away from it.

What’s binding them together, after all of this? The weight of Kent’s love is exhausting. He texts and sends cards, forwards links to silly internet things he assumes Jack would laugh at, and sends Aces merch when it’s available: first a Parson 90 jersey and a Parson 90 hat, and then a shirt with Kent’s face on it and then all kinds of goofy shit: a giant flag, a coin bank, a mug, and a set of coasters.

“Enough,” Jack texts back after a particularly annoying, _so did you get it yet?_. He is lying on his back on the couch, almost paralyzed by how many asinine pieces of sports marketing crap have come out of the beat-up reused moving box Kent has lovingly labelled in pink washable marker with Jack’s name and home address. There’s also a card and that card says:

_Let there be a silver lining here. We were always going different places by design. But now we’re not? Come to Vegas with me._

Worst, this is written in Quebec French. That’s really serious, from Kent, whose best French is made to be spit at an opponent over the ice. It’s jarring, because the fact that these words are written in French is such a comfort to Jack. It’s such a comfort. And this note, it’s like a proposal. Jack’s feelings haven’t changed since he left the hospital, or since the draft, or since Kent packed up all of his earthly belongings, of which there were few, mostly scattered around Jack’s bedroom. He bought a car, shoved the box into it. Jack’s feelings haven’t changed since Kent drove the car, and the box inside of it, down to Nevada. It’s very tiring, but Jack forces himself to sit up.

Jack is holding the card between his fingers. The air conditioning is on and since Jack is still getting hot flashes, he’s sitting directly under it. The card from Kent is wavering back and forth, and Jack is conscious of his flabby stomach pooling on the tops of his thighs.

“Oh,” says Jack’s father, who happens to walk through the room. “Are those coasters?”

“I guess,” Jack says, and he gets up and throws the note away. “How stupid. He knows I’m a Habs fan.”

Bob picks up the package of coasters and studies it. “You can’t be a Habs fan if you mean to get back into professional hockey and play for another team.”

“Or, maybe my only chance to get back into professional hockey is if you pull some strings and get me on _that_ team.”

“Do you want me to do that?” Jack’s father asks. He puts down the coasters and looks at his son, like if Jack says ‘yes’ he’ll whip his phone out and just do it, right here.

“Not really,” Jack says, honestly. He’s so bothered that he goes upstairs and immediately Skypes Kent.

“Let me see the jersey on you,” Kent demands. “Put it on. I want to see you in my jersey.”

“It’s downstairs,” Jack says.

“So go get it.”

“Kenny, I’m tired.”

And Kent softens. “What’s eating you?” he asks, then adds, “Since I’m not.”

“I think my father just seriously offered to call the Molsons and get me on the Habs.”

Kent stiffens. “Do you think he could?”

Jack thinks about it. “On the Bulldogs, maybe.”

Pensively, Kent asks, “Do you want that?”

Jack defers. “Do _you_ want that?”

“Well, I was hoping—you could come to Las Vegas.”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “I know. Your card said.”

“But I mean, if you came out this year, got to know the team—next year, maybe. It’s a good organization. They could train you up, get you in shape—”

Jack looks away, touches his soft stomach. “I don’t know, Parse. I don’t know if I can go anywhere. I’ve got—stuff to do here.”

“Like what?” Kent presses. “Like raise our baby—wait.”

“That was mean,” Jack says, and he shuts the screen on the call and sits there shaking, actually panicking. He’s got nothing to do and nowhere to go except playing house with Kent in Las Vegas. He decides, while he’s sitting there, his incision throbbing and his thoughts racing, that he would rather hang out in the house with his parents for a while—soften a little more, let his tits finish drying up, and let the scar across his middle fade a bit. Then he’ll be able to move on, get the weight off, build up muscle again, be better. He was never on a path that was leading him to domestic bliss with Kent Parson. A long-distance thing, _maybe_. Were they even _dating_? Jack tries to remember and he can’t. “Of course we were dating!” he hears an imaginary version of Kent shriek at him. But Jack doesn’t know what dating is if it’s all taking place below the covers and around the corner and in the backseat and one really, really depraved time, in a jerk-off theater in downtown Halifax. The other guys on the team got up to shit, so why shouldn’t they? Because _this_ happened, Jack tells himself, and now they are suffering for it.

To apologize, Kent sends him a huge bouquet. It’s full of stargazer lilies and peonies. “Oh, these are nice,” Jack’s mother says, when she walks into the kitchen and catches him staring at it, bereft. “Is this from Kent?”

“No,” says Jack. “It’s from one of my many secret admirers.”

“They’re not being very secretive about it, sending this huge thing,” she says.

Jack says, “Ha ha,” because he doesn’t actually find it funny. He reads the card: _Sorry I was a dick. I’m glad you’re not raising our baby. Paying child support would suck. Then I wouldn’t be able to afford these great presents!_ Jack doesn’t even have the energy to send Kent a text message telling him to stop.

What happens next is, though, his parents suffocate him. They’re so supportive. It’s really shocking. They keep telling Jack he can do whatever he wants, and asking him how he feels, and encouraging him to eat more protein and vegetables, but without telling him he has to. “Eat your green beans,” his mother will say to him, softly, at dinner. “Or if you don’t like green beans I can make you something else. I can steam some asparagus, or I think we have frozen peas. I could make you a little salad? I know you used to like green beans when you were a little boy, though, you’d put them on your fork very methodically so that they’d get stacked up, all the way up the fork’s tines”—she knows specific words like that because she went to college. She is the only one at the dinner table with anything resembling a college education. For a minute, Jack wonders, what if I knew fancy words, too? Would I use them? But then he realizes, probably not.

“Stop babying me,” Jack says. He gets up and storms away from the table. He thinks about what it would be like if this was happening, but he had a baby. Sitting at the dinner table with his parents, nursing, trying to eat around that, maybe helping himself to a second serving of green beans. He’s actually never thought about liking green beans before, or not—he tends to just eat what’s put in front of him, unless the texture is really bad.

He tries to get Kent on Skype, but Kent is not signed in. He probably has practice or something. Kent has things like that to do! Jack has spent the past two months poking at his sickening body, languishing in front of the TV, fielding soft complaints from his parents that they wish he’d tell him how to help him, and deferring therapy, which he is starting to feel like will only make things worse, because he already knows he ruined his life, so, what would be the point of that? He hasn’t put on a pair of jeans in months now. First none of them fit, and then he was supposed to avoid irritating his incision. He’s sure none of them fit anyway, but he could go get new pants. Or at least try to squeeze into his clothes. His ass was always pretty big, so finding jeans was never, like, especially easy. Kent used to joke about how someday in the future when they were married and living together, Kent was gonna keep him naked all the time, “maybe in panties.” Jack’s never put on a pair of panties, like, between the two of them that’s not really _his_ thing, but he’s halfway to that point anyway now, he realizes. Why not go all the way? He envisions lazy afternoons at Kent’s apartment, when Kent is home from practice: Kent climbing back into bed with Jack. Whispering, “Did you miss me?” In Jack’s fantasies, Kent’s hands never roam away from his ass. Sometimes Jack imagines Kent calling him “mamacita.” Ordering in pancakes for breakfast in the morning. Can you get those delivered? Probably, in Vegas. Grocery shopping, except Jack doesn’t have to go if he doesn’t want to. Nights out with Kent’s team, except Jack doesn’t have to go if he doesn’t want to. Kent telling him he’s perfect but helping him lose the weight anyway. Not having to wear pants until he’s ready.

Jack texts Kent, _Please Skype me. I really need you_. It feels like a lie, like he’s being dramatic. Still, he spends the two hours until Kent is available lying on his side and gaping at the program until he gets a call.

“Zimms,” Kent says. It’s small and soft, the way Jack feels. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

“I’ll come to Vegas,” Jack says, shocking himself. “I’ll come visit. Buy me a ticket. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

“Okay.” Kent is sweaty, like he got home from a workout and didn’t bother showering, just immediately got on the computer because Jack demanded it. “When do you want to come?”

“Whenever,” Jack says. “Tomorrow, I don’t care.”

“Do you, um, have a preferred airline?”

“Not really.”

Kent forwards him an e-ticket. It’s a one-way thing, which leaves on Friday afternoon, on Air Canada.

“Oh, honey,” Jack’s mother says, when he goes to find his parents in front of the TV, to tell them he’s going. They’re sort of snuggling together while they watch some show Jack doesn’t know about. “That’ll be nice.”

“It’s good to get out of the house for a while,” his dad offers. “You could try gambling.”

“Gambling?” Jack asks.

“Forget it,” says his dad. “Just have fun. Do you need a ride to the airport?”

Of course he does. How else would he get there?

~ ~ ~

True to Jack’s expectations, there are pancakes, which Kent cooks, badly, while he’s naked except for a half-apron that has a Las Vegas Aces logo on it. Jack really hopes Kent isn’t actually buying all of this Aces stuff. It reminds him of how, according to his mother, when you work at a clothing store, you end up spending most of your money on buying clothing from the company to wear to work. Shouldn’t they give it to you for free? As thanks, or maybe as a reward, or something? Jack hopes Kent is getting what he’s owed. The Aces are not a good team. _That could have been my Las Vegas Aces apron_ , Jack thinks to himself. Then again, the only time he ever tried to cook, it was when his mother arranged a playdate for him with some other kid in his class. He was about 9 or 10 and really obsessed with hockey, and when this kid came over and wanted to do just about anything other than talk about hockey stats Jack was at a loss. “We could make cookies,” the little twerp had suggested, and because Jack had never personally tried to do that before, he didn’t quite realize it wasn’t a great idea. They came out melted, not baked, which seemed impossible, and when Jack’s babysitter had found them she’d let out a _sacre_ and added, “What were you thinking?” and lectured him while she stuck his head under a faucet and tried to get the dried egg white out of his hair. His playdate thought this was funny and stood there laughing at him, and in retrospect maybe it was funny for that kid, but they never had a playdate again because Jack had begged his mother not to make him spend time with other kids anymore.

Anyway, Kent is only passingly better at cooking than _that_. He slides a plate of half-cooked pancakes in front of Jack and sits down next to him at the counter in his apron and says, “Eat up!” and when Jack bites into one he cringes, because this is just so bad. “Do you have syrup?” Jack asks, and surely Kent’s spent enough time in Canada to know what _syrup_ is, but he produces some American-made bullshit that is not even close, and tears come to Jack’s eyes and he pushes the plate away and says, “I’m not hungry.”

“I’m trying,” says Kent, like he’s hurt. “Man, I’ve never made pancakes before! I was really excited to try it.”

“Don’t cook me any food from now on,” Jack insists, and they walk to McDonald’s for breakfast, because it’s the closest place. Unfortunately McDonald’s stopped serving breakfast well in advance of their arrival, and ultimately they wander up and down the street looking for something, anything.

They end up at a diner that also doesn’t have actual syrup, just goo in square-ish packets. Jack miserably pokes at a side plate of sunny-side-up eggs and sighs while Kent beams into his egg white omelet and discusses the diet he’s supposed to stick to, now that he’s a professional hockey player. It rather sounds like a drag, but Jack doesn’t demean it. He’s wearing mesh shorts from before his pregnancy and they are a little too small, and they ride up and his thighs stick to the seat while the rest of his exposed body is freezing because this place has their air conditioning up like it’s the apocalypse. To be fair, Jack supposes, it is uncomfortable outside. The worst aspect of this is that Kent seems very pleased with himself, prattling about the guys on the team and how they all like him. Jack can’t look at Kent and instead drinks his coffee—which is bad, it’s bad diner coffee—and thinks about how if it were _him_ on this team then these guys would all like _him_. It’s a stupid fantasy because, look, of course they wouldn’t. No one likes him. Well, Kent likes him—Kent is using his shoe to kind of rub Jack’s calf under the table, and now he’s leaning in and saying, “You gonna be okay while I’m at work today, Zimms?” Which is an awfully funny thing to say, because it may be true, hockey is Kent’s job strictly speaking, but even in that sense, Jack could never bring himself to think about it as work.

But, the fact is, Jack probably will miss Kent, because he doesn’t know what else to do with himself. He’s brought some books—maybe that’s good enough. Kent leaves him and goes to work out with his teammates. Jack’s books are cold comfort. He is thick in the middle of _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ , which is an inspiring book that makes him feel quite bad about himself, if for no other reason than that he could never have the stamina to write a book like this. He’s getting into the Constantine stuff and this feels pretty late in Roman history to him, but there is a lot of material left and it’s making Jack anxious, because how comprehensive is this history going to get? Or maybe he is anxious because he is reading this while tangled in the nest of Kent’s unwashed sheets, which smell like sweat and faintly like Kent’s obnoxious deodorant. He liked being fucked in this bed and it distracts him from the Gibbon and he starts worrying that maybe they ought to be using condoms.

Jack would never go out and get condoms, so he begins poking around in Kent’s bedside table to see if there just happen to be any in there. Most of his stuff is not unpacked, but the drawer is somehow already stuffed with garbage—notes Kent wrote to himself, used tissues probably stiff with dried emissions, protein bar wrappers, various cords. Jack is annoyed and writes a message, “Can you pick up some condoms? I don’t want any more accidents.”

It takes 20 minutes or so for Kent to reply, the duration of which Jack spends a nervous wreck, his head under a pillow while he worries that maybe he’s fucked up and after last night is already, you know, pregnant again.

Finally Kent writes back, “Yeah, that’d be bad, if that happened I’d have to $pank you” with a fucking _dollar sign_ , and that’s got to be deliberate and it makes Jack angry.

He replies, “I need emergency contraception.”

“You got it,” Kent writes back. _Then_ , he writes: “Condoms, ec, lots of $pankings when daddy gets home from work.”

This makes Jack furious to the point that when Kent does get home, all freshly showered and carrying a Walgreens bag, Jack is waiting for him on the couch with his arms crossed. “Please don’t refer to yourself like that ever again,” he says, though it’s not really a request.

“Did you miss me?” Kent asks.

“No,” Jack says, though he did.

“Well.” Kent sighs, taking his shoes off. “I have condoms here, but, bad news, the Walgreens didn’t have any morning-after pills. Apparently it was just approved for over-the-counter like, a month ago. Cool, huh? We can go to Planned Parenthood later, if you want.”

“Great. Yeah.”

“Come here.”

Jack complies and gets up off the couch.

“Anyway, here’s your damn condoms, but if we’re just gonna get a pill then maybe we can do it without ‘em first. Or a couple times, whatever you’re up for. In a seventy-two-hour period starting from whenever we banged yesterday.” Kent grabs him, kisses him. Has to get up on his toes to reach. “Were you good while I was gone?”

“I read my book.”

“Get up to anything good? Did you touch yourself?” Kent heads back into his bedroom. Jack has only recently motivated himself to _not_ be in that bedroom, so he follows with some reluctance.

“I wasn’t beating off to the Roman Empire, no. Is that what you make of me?”

“I dunno, Zimms, you’re…” Kent trails off. He just sighs and sits down on the bed. “You’re like this guy who’s liable to do anything, because you _never_ do anything, so how am I supposed to know what you’ve got in you?”

This is kind of crushing, because this whole time, since he first let Kent tentatively if lovingly molest him under a fleece warm-up in the very back row of the team bus on the way to some game—actually, Jack remembers _precisely_ which game—November 2007, over the river, on the way to Chicoutimi—Jack has assumed that Kent knows precisely what he’s got in him, and that this is what’s kept Kent invested. He was hoping Kent would tell him. He was hoping. But jesus, what even is all of this if Kent doesn’t know? How could he not? Maybe Jack doesn’t but Jack’s got self-insensitivity, or some kind of personal blindness. Kent’s got the biggest, clearest eyes of anyone Jack knows; he sees slivers of space between the goalie and the post that Jack can only partially imagine. If he can’t look at Jack and see what’s in there, will anyone, ever? He’s just this big, stupid boy, moderate hockey talent, passable singing voice, a trust fund, and the genetic material out of which some kid was made, and one day that kid’s gonna show up and demand some of that trust fund money, probably, so if Jack can’t get it together and figure out what he’s got in him, what’s he going to have to give?

“Kenny,” Jack chokes out, and it’s wet, but he’s not crying.

The extent of their miscommunication is made clear when Kent sits on the bed and says, “What’s wrong, baby?” Kisses Jack. Slides a hand up the leg of Jack’s mesh shorts. He’s not wearing underwear and through that opening Kent gets access to everything: all his junk, his impossibly thick middle, the vicious scar that’s healing but still angry-red and a little scabby. Kent gets his thumb over it while they kiss.

And Jack kisses back because he’s stiff now and he wants it.

They start out having gentle sex, which is unusual for them. Kent is typically all blurting out his stupid things and sometimes those things make Jack laugh and sometimes they force him to recoil in horror and hate himself. But Kent pushes Jack’s legs up and takes him slowly and deeply, while they hold hands. Kent gets down so they can kiss again and Jack slurs _Kenny_ when he gets a breath. One of Kent’s hands drops from Jack’s and Kent gropes him, gropes the side of Jack’s thigh and gets under his ass. “I love this ass,” he says. “I love it. I love being inside this ass—don’t you?”

“Being inside my own ass?” Jack asks, confused.

“No, don’t you love me inside it?”

“I love it, yeah,” Jack pants, because yeah. Yeah, he does—Kent touching him everywhere, his whole body a receptor for Kent. Like, isn’t that just true? Wasn’t that just how it was? His body was always just a vessel waiting for Kent and then it sheltered Kent’s progeny and now, no matter what Jack does or where he goes, he’ll always just be this thing that used to house the distillation of his enduring and, frankly, upsetting lust for Kent Parson.

“You love it,” Kent says, and Jack cries, “I do.”

“You love me,” Kent says, and Jack manages to moan without shaping any kind of words. But it’s still an answer, and it prompts Kent to say, “I love you.” He’s pushing such tiny little thrusts into Jack that their bodies aren’t even making any kind of sweaty noise when they collide—there’s no real colliding going on, anyway, just the squeak of this shitty Ikea full-size. It’s like Jack knows Kent is waiting for that answer. Well, he won’t get the satisfaction. Kent stops, doesn’t pull out, gets Jack onto his side.

“I’m gonna come in this ass like it’s a safety deposit box. You gonna keep it secure for me?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t give anyone the key.”

“I won’t.”

“I’m gonna need you to fill out a signature card,” Kent pants, and it’s punctuated by tiny bursts of his hips into Jack’s ass.

They haven’t had sex that lasted this long—maybe ever. They’ve been actively fucking for like eight, maybe nine minutes. That’s really astounding to Jack. Typically he comes on himself the minute Kent shocks him, which usually doesn’t take very long. But Jack’s mind is elsewhere—his thoughts, all muddled. This may be the first time Jack has ever genuinely felt like they were _making love_. Later, when he’s older and wiser and he has been with a partner with whom that phrase rings very true, he’ll ask himself just what it was about this particular fuck sesh on the pile of rags and come-soaked gym shorts that Kent Parson used as a bed that struck Jack, at the time, as particularly loving, or made him think of manufacture, like it was so productive. The only thing that will ever come to mind for him is that it was, at least in the beginning, slow, and not desperate.

Around the ten-minute marker it gets desperate.

Kent flips him, buries his face in Jack’s ass, and mumbles into it, “Remember how I got you pregnant?”

Jack would have thought that would kill off his desire to keep at this, but, not really. It’s weirdly hot. “I remember,” Jack says.

“I promised spankings,” Kent reminds him. Jack can hear the dollar sign.

It’s good because, fuck, Jack feels like he deserves it. But there’s something perfunctory about it, too, like in order to sate Jack’s bottomless lust Kent has had to really think about what he’s going to do next. It doesn’t come easy, like it did when they were younger. That was all of two years ago. Jack feels like he’s lived a million lifetimes. Wow, he was stupid. He was stupid and he deserves to groan through this battery of repudiation, Kent’s hand against his ass over and over again while Kent’s dick grazes him wetly, still leaking at the tip and slicked with gooey hand lotion. Now that is the worst, the absolute worst a person can use, and Jack would have hoped that Kent would have it together enough to actually, physically go to a fucking pharmacy and collect some kind of legitimate lube to fuck Jack’s ass with. He’s not just being a brat, he—he half-pushed a baby out of there, for fuck’s sake, just a couple of months ago. In his head Jack hears some disassociated voice sneering, “Oh, Bob’s Zimmermann’s son is too good to get fucked with lotion?” Honestly, no, he’s not, he’s—Kent has fucked him with a million even worse things. Once when Jack was having pretty bad allergies they used _snot_ for fuck’s sake, like, this isn’t a matter of Jack having any self-respect, because he doesn’t; he would let Kent do just about anything to him, and at this point it’s starting to feel like if he doesn’t and he somehow loses this he won’t be anything, because even Kent can’t figure out what makes him fucking human.

But, just, the lotion is kind of breaking him. He doesn’t think of himself as delicate but feeling it against his hole while Kent bobs around there while he’s spanking the shit out of Jack’s ass is just too much, it’s too much, and even as he’s coming on himself in quick pulses that time up with the slap of Kent’s palm against his skin, Jack just starts crying. He just cries.

It takes Kent a minute to stop and Jack can feel him stiffen. He says, “Oh,” and more softly, “Oh, no.” His hand stills on Jack’s ass. It’s burning, stinging. It’s a good feeling. He’s felt like this for months; it’s just physical now. “Zimms, hey. You okay?”

“No, Parse, you piece of shit,” Jack cries. “I’m not okay.”

“Well.” Kent helps Jack turn over, which Jack knows is supposed to be relieving but it doesn’t make his butt feel any less on fire. “Can I do something?”

“I need the pill. I want to go to Planned Parenthood.”

“Yeah,” Kent agrees. “Okay, we can go there.” He looks really stupid and really hot—all his dumb hair sticking up, holding his hard dick in his hand, Jack’s thumbprints up and down his arms. He says, “ _Jack_ ,” really softly. He looks like he wants to bury his face in Jack’s chest and cry, too. Instead, he slips off the bed, mumbling, “I’m just gonna—” He retreats into the bathroom.

Going to Planned Parenthood is humiliating. Everyone’s kind to Jack and they don’t really ask him anything, just give him the pill and explain how it works and what might happen. They really downplay the side effects. The receptionist gives him a glass of water and Jack swallows it while Kent pays. No idea how much it costs—Jack doesn’t give a shit. The nation of Canada paid for all of the care he got in the past year. Kent can pay this time.

When they’re back in the car, and Jack is really dreading having to go back to Kent’s—he almost slips and thinks _their_ —apartment, Kent asks him, “Do you want to go out to dinner?”

Jack starts crying again, and he can’t stop. He’s having—yeah, this is probably a panic attack. Holy shit, he is trapped here, with this guy, in this horrible desert, and he’s just recently 19 and has managed, somehow, in that very short time, to have trashed his whole life to the extent that he’s got nothing and he belongs nowhere. He wants to yearn for something but there isn’t anything he even wants. There’s no comfort, there’s never been any comfort, and it’s just so wearying. He’s so tired and so unhappy. His chest is just like—god, it’s painful. He’s starting to feel pretty sick.

It gets worse when he looks over at Kent, and Kent just seems horrified. He’s witnessed Jack fall apart before, but not like this. Not to the point where he’s sobbing and sobbing and clawing at his face, just this fucking disaster sweating in the front seat of a cheap car with fabric seats.

Kent grabs one of Jack’s hands. “Hey,” he says. It’s neutral. “You’re hurting yourself.”

Jack doesn’t answer, because there’s no answer.

“Zimms,” Kent presses. “Jack, hey.” He’s holding onto Jack’s hand like it’s precious. “Jack, I’m here, okay.” Like that’s any kind of fucking comfort. “Maybe you should, like, breathe—”

“I hope I never see it again,” Jack cries. “I never want to see it again.”

“Never want to see what?” Kent asks. “The inside of Planned Parenthood?”

“I hate it, I fucking hate it, I hate what it did to me.” Even as Jack is sobbing this he knows he doesn’t really mean what he’s saying. He really hates himself, is the thing. He hates that he’s this huge awful disaster and he can’t be what people want. No, actually, that isn’t it—forget people, people are nothing to him. He can’t be what _he_ wants.

“Oh,” Kent says, very quietly. “You mean the baby.”

“You have no idea what it was like,” Jack says. “This thing, always with me.”

“Jack, I was there.”

“No you weren’t,” Jack cries.

“Yeah, I was, and like—I’m here now.”

“No, you’re in Las Vegas.”

“We both are.” Kent reaches behind and taps on his window. “We’re here together.”

“I’m no one, I’m nowhere.”

“Well, maybe not with that attitude? Come to practice with me, this team—they’re desperate. They need you, Jack. I need you. We can play hockey together, okay? They’d flip their shit over you. Especially if you wait a year, they can pick you up as an unrestricted free agent.”

“I haven’t played hockey in months.”

“They’ll help—the Aces have trainers, Zimms, they’re a hockey team—uh, we’re a hockey team. And I’ll help, I’ll do whatever—”

“You’ve done enough,” Jack says.

“No I haven’t! Fuck, look at yourself, I clearly haven’t.”

Well, Jack can agree with that, probably. At the same time, though, he just wishes Kent would stop trying.

~ ~ ~

The next morning, Jack wakes up feeling like he’s pregnant again. It’s horrifying. He’s sickened. His tits hurt. It takes him a minute to collect his thoughts: the side effects. Well, it just figures that whatever the worst possible reaction is, he’s having it. He moans so loudly that Kent gets up, even though they were up pretty late just miserably trying to figure out how the fuck to use condoms. Lotion, not the best. They’d had to make another Walgreens run around midnight to get some normal lube. Nothing truly erroneous happened, but it was a rough night.

“You okay?” Kent asks.

“I’m gonna be sick.” Jack tries to get out of bed, but he doesn’t, and ends up barfing into Kent’s lap. That hasn’t happened since he got super, super drunk at a victory party and tried to suck Kent’s dick in the woods behind some asshole’s house. Kent was always a little less wasted than he was. Why didn’t Kent stop that from happening?

Kent is unceremonious. He tosses away the covers, vomit too, and lets Jack rest his head between his legs. He pets Jack’s hair. He whispers, “Poor Zimms. Man. Shit’s rough for you.”

It really is, Jack thinks. It really fucking is.

~ ~ ~

The next couple of days are spent groaning in Kent’s bed. It’s hard not to see that Kent would’ve been a pretty good dad, or at least tried. He gets Jack cold ginger ale in various mismatching glassware. He microwaves packets of macaroni and makes ramen that comes freeze-dried in a block. He provides whichever color of Gatorade Jack demands when he gets back from skating. On the third day, he’s got the day off.

“Maybe we could check out a casino,” Kent suggests.

So Jack struggles into a pair of gym shorts and forces himself into Kent’s car.

Well, maybe they _could_ , but they’re not old enough, so they get turned away at the door of the MGM Grand. “Figures!” Kent says, like it’s funny.

They get dinner at the buffet in another casino, Excalibur. It’s like a fake castle, wonderfully inappropriate since Jack feels the opposite of regal. There are people buzzing around, too many of them, a real mix of characters: screaming children, the doddering elderly, people roughly their age who look like they’re there to pre-game. Jack might have had a drink with dinner, but he’s forgotten again that he’s not legal here. It puts him in a bad mood, and all he eats for dinner are mashed potatoes and macaroni.

“Dinner of champions, huh?” Kent is eating a plate of salad that’s loaded with all kinds of things: dried cranberries, bits of crouton, several shredded varieties of cheese, turkey or chicken (Jack can’t tell) and many colors of bell pepper. He has a hard-boiled egg on the side, which he eats whole.

While digging a well in his potatoes, Jack asks, “Why did we come here?”

“I dunno. It’s Vegas? We were already on the Strip?”

The kids at the next table over are screeching and screeching about wanting to go on a rollercoaster. Canadian children would never do that, Jack thinks to himself. They would ask politely and then keep quiet, satisfied with any answer, yes or no. That can’t be right, but Jack just can’t envision how rotten a parent someone’s got to be to end up with kids screaming bloody murder in a public place, even a public place that’s nothing more or less than a giant theme park. These kids, they’re really stressing Jack out.

“Are you okay?” Kent is chewing his turkey or chicken, but his eyes are full of concern.

“Can we go? It’s just, I hate it here, so can we go?”

“Yeah. Sure, babe, we can go.”

Jack flinches at being called “babe” in public, but lets Kent guide him through the sensory mess of the casino back outside.

Outside is no better, of course, with its barrage of lights, the roar of traffic, and the hordes of loud children on every sidewalk. Kent hails a cab, and gives the driver his address. The inside of the taxi is bad, too—the radio is on, and it’s loud, and the vehicle smells like someone’s been smoking in it, and also like stale plastic fittings. The leather seats stick to his thighs, the air conditioning is on too high and Jack is freezing, and he can feel his tits puckering up and visibly through the too-tight shirt he’s wearing.

“How much should I tip?” Kent asks Jack, probably just to have something to say. Everything about this is bad, and Jack hasn’t even got the patience to wait for Kent to pay and get change back from the driver.  He doesn’t know the first thing about tipping cab drivers, and he really can’t be in this car anymore. So he gets out and leans against the side of the building, heart pounding, gasping for lungsful of dry desert heat. Even in nighttime Jack feels oppressed: by the air, by the harsh lights that line the paths of Kent’s apartment complex, by Kent stumbling out of the cab and stupidly grabbing Jack’s hands and asking, “What’s wrong?”

It would be so satisfying to give Kent a good answer: _I’m hot, my skin is itchy, that cab smelled terrible, the light is bothering me, those potatoes weren’t very good, my clothes don’t fit like they should and I worry that everyone is laughing at me._ Instead, Jack croaks, “I want to go home.”

Quietly, Kent says, “Let’s go inside.”

Jack can agree to that, and goes willingly; he would hate to lose it out here, where one of the other residents could very well overhear him.

As soon as they’re inside, Kent says, “Sorry about the buffet. I guess it was a bad idea.”

“Coming here was a bad idea.”

“No it wasn’t.”

Jack isn’t in the mood. “Yes, it was.”

“I get a lot is going on, and we’re both kinda on-edge—”

“I want to go home,” Jack insists. “Go online and buy me a ticket home.”

A mean, hurt look develops on Kent’s face. “You go online and buy your ticket, if you want to go home.”

“I don’t know how. And you’re the one who brought me here, so—so, you do it. You got the contract you wanted so you could buy things, so, you buy a ticket for me.”

“But I don’t want you to leave.”

“I hate it here. Las Vegas sucks. I want to go home.”

“ _Zimms_.” It’s pleading.

“I want to go home.”

Now Kent is starting to sound desperate: “Maybe we oughta sleep on it.”

It’s barely 9 at night. “We can sleep on it if you want, but I’m still going to want to go home in the morning.”

Jack hates Kent like this—frightened, desperate. He gets kind of mean. “Okay, but, home to what? To moping around and, like, hanging out with your parents? To just being nothing? Doing nothing, having nothing, going nowhere—”

Jack can’t have this argument, so he sprints away from Kent and locks himself in the bathroom.

For a terrifying thirty-second period—Jack counts—Kent pounds on the door and shouts things like, “Okay, hiding from me in the bathroom isn’t fixing anything! What the fuck kind of screwed-up person does that?” Jack says nothing, but inwardly, he is thinking: Me. _I do_. He sits on the toilet, having some anxiety attack. The truth is, even if he has to leave Las Vegas, he doesn’t really want to go back to Montreal. A big part of him really would like to get away from Kent, but there’s also a part that doesn’t know what to do or how to be _without_ Kent. It’s a horrifying thought. He has to go elsewhere, but where else could he possibly go? He’s got no team to go back to; even if they took him back in Rimouski, he couldn’t show his face there, and it’s unlikely that would get him back onto NHL radars. It’s stay here or crawl back to his parents. That fact alone is enough to make Jack wig out.

When Jack emerges from the bathroom, he’s aware that his eyes are red and his hair is all mussed from pulling at it.

Kent is in bed with a copy of Sports Illustrated. He doesn’t bother looking up. “You don’t have to fucking hide from me, you know.” He licks his thumb and turns the page. “You really ought to let me help you. I’m not your enemy, Jack, okay?” That he doesn’t look away from the magazine as he says this is somehow very scary.

“Just because you’re not my enemy doesn’t mean you can help me or that I don’t have to hide,” Jack says. He sounds pretty hoarse to his own ears.

Finally, Kent tosses the magazine on the floor. It’s splayed open on an article about Oklahoma State football, which Jack is sure Kent doesn’t care about. “Okay.” Kent sounds crazy. “How about this? You think you’re not good enough for my help, or that you’re so fucked up you have to hide from everyone, even me. But you don’t. You know why? Because I fucking love you.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Jack says. He climbs over Kent, lies down, and turns away, back to him.

Very late—or very early—or when it’s still pitch black out, anyway, Jack is wide awake and praying for sleep. Kent is awake too, his rhythmic breathing the most familiar sound in the world. Jack cannot stand how that noise is like an old friend, a deeply held belief, an ancient proverb. It’s keeping him up when he rather wishes he could pass out and wake up in the morning so he can buy a plane ticket and leave this place forever.

Then Jack must stir, or otherwise give a sign of life that reads as a request, because Kent has the audacity to open his mouth and say, “You said you needed me.”

Well, what is Jack supposed to say to _that_? Without missing a beat, the words come out of his mouth before he can question them: “I guess I don’t.”

It’s not entirely accurate, at least not at that moment. But Jack is pleased when Kent seems upset in the morning, and buys him a flight home without fighting about it.

~ ~ ~

Inching back into hockey is harder than Jack would have imagined. And it’s not even that hard; all he has to do is tell his dad he wants it, and he’s got a nutritionist, a trainer, and an assistant coaching job with a peewee team.  He’s got the aptitude for it, which stuns him. At least the kids are old enough that they don’t remind him of—well, 11- and 12-year-old boys are by no means babies. They’re closer to Jack in age than they are to infancy, really. Once or twice he wonders if his son will grow up to play hockey somewhere. It’s Quebec, after all, and the kid’s got the genes for it. Will he be on a team like this someday, coached by a fledgling superstar turned burnout, resenting that he has no idea the source of his own talent? Jack daydreams, with dread, of coaching eleven years into the future and realizing, _oh my god, holy shit, the way that forward holds his stick...the way he’s short with freckles across the bridge of his nose, droopy eyes, so sad_ —or would he be cocky, self-assured, having fun and laughing as he shakes his impossible cowlick out of his eyes? It doesn’t matter, Jack decides, because he has to get out of here. If he stays in Quebec a minute longer than it takes to plot his permanent escape, well. He can’t imagine doing anything rash, but. He’s not staying here, he promises himself. If that kid does somehow manage to come up, Jack won’t be around to find out.

(This becomes much clearer to him as soon as he gets back into seeing a therapist.)

As far as the rest of it is concerned, it’s not that Jack doesn’t want to see Kent. He would like to see Kent. When Kent is not around, Jack misses him. Kent was funny. Kent was hot. Kent made Jack feel like he was the most important person alive. Those are all great qualities of Kent’s, to Jack’s mind.

Unfortunately, when Jack _does_ see Kent over the next couple of years, he can’t get away fast enough. It’s painful. He can’t wrap his head around it. It would be easier to have lived without knowing Kent at all, Jack thinks when they’re together. Then he’d never know what it was like to have had it in the first place. How did something that made him feel like the absolute center of the universe turn to ash so quickly?

Kent thinks it’s the baby. Jack won’t find this out until he’s a sophomore in college, and Kent Parson comes to taunt him with the ghost of the Stanley fucking Cup. They get so angry they fall into bed together, and for a while it’s pretty good. It’s dirty but subdued, Kent’s hands all over the hard terrain of Jack’s new body. When it’s over, and Kent is getting soft inside Jack, he grabs Jack’s face and says, “You threw me away because you didn’t want any reminder of how painful it was”—sure, that’s true, but Kent means it in a totally different way.

“I didn’t throw you away,” Jack says, rolling his eyes. “It ended. You’re the captain of the fucking Las Vegas Aces, you have everything, you have a _Stanley Cup_. Why do you need me too?”

And Kent shrieks, “You’re a monster, how could you even say that? If not for that fucking kid we’d be—”

Jack yells back, “Nothing! We’d be nothing, I’m nothing, you said so yourself! You’re the fucking captain of a _Stanley Cup-winning hockey team_ , for fuck’s sake—!”

Some of Jack’s team overhears the end of this. They make assumptions. Let them, Jack thinks. Maybe their assumptions aren’t wrong.

Kent shows up again when Jack is a senior. It’s tragic, because he’s finally starting to live his life. Some days he doesn’t even remember he _had_ a baby. He goes hours without even being reminded. Hockey teams want him to play for them, miraculously. Who’d have thought? Then Kent rolls in and he interrupts what was, up until then, a perfectly enjoyable party experience. As soon as they’re alone together they’re on each other like it’s 2008. Kent’s fingers crawl across his asshole and they worm inside dry. Jack is on birth control now, and he hasn’t had sex since Kent’s _last_ uninvited trip to Samwell, and everything is lining up for this to be pretty good until Kent starts poking Jack’s prostate for answers to questions about fucking hockey teams. Kent asks about Las Vegas and Jack says, “I don’t know,” because he knows he will never go back to Las Vegas until he’s playing them once a year as a member of literally any other organization, but if he says that maybe he won’t get to come on Kent’s dick rubbing against that spot—man, he likes this. He really forgot how much he likes this. But Kent, that asshole, he won’t leave it alone, with his “stop thinking” and belittling Jack’s team. It’s needy to the point where Jack doesn’t care how much is dick is leaking while Kent eats his sweaty face—he can’t do this. He wishes he could, it’s just—

Just, why can’t it be easy for them? Why can’t it ever be fucking easy for _him_? Why can’t Kent keep his fucking mouth shut? Jack has a rough night, and when he has an emergency call with his shrink the next day, he realizes Kent didn’t even bring up the baby this time. Jack knows it was never about the baby. It was about the fact that Kent loved him, and Jack hated himself. Kent would try and try to overcome that, but it was fundamentally incompatible. Well, drowning in affection is still drowning. Jack wishes, he really does, that he’d been able to tread the waters of Kent’s love like they were the gentlest ocean currents.

“We owe each other a lot of apologies,” Jack tells Bittle, who asks him about it. It’s such a pathetic little way to wrap things up. It doesn’t really get at the core of what happened, and Jack doesn’t even know if Bittle knows—about him and Kent, or the baby, or any of it. They get closer, and sometimes Jack thinks about telling him. Bittle would—what a beautiful baby that would be! Big eyes. Huge, blue eyes with long lashes, a little snub nose, a rosebud mouth and loose yellow curls—

Wait—this is crazy. Jack doesn’t even want kids. He definitely doesn’t want to go through all of that again. … _Wait_. Why is he thinking about what would happen if he had a baby with Bittle? He wishes he still drank, so he could submerge this thought and black out. But he doesn’t, and he’s got homework to do, and his team is a very real NCAA hockey championship contender. So Jack switches this part of his brain off, the part that’s worried about Bittle’s baby, and tries to go back to existing as a functionally sexless, goal-oriented automaton. Some days it’s the only way he can keep going.

But in the end, he can’t go back to that. Bittle makes him feel like—like _he can never go back to that_. He’s slow to figure out why.

He’s always been slow about the important things, though.

~ ~ ~

It takes Jack some time to share this story with Bittle. Their romance is new even if their friendship is not, and it feels fragile to Jack. He’s so large, comparatively—so much older, so much wiser, in the sense that he has seen and done much more. It’s not that the details of his life aren’t available for anyone to find on the internet. It’s just that, to have it come out of his own mouth? That makes it real. But he does it. He doesn’t go down to Georgia to talk about it specifically, but he knows he needs to tell Bittle about it in person. It’s not fair to keep it to himself. If there’s one thing he should have learned, he should have learned that.

It’s hard, but he gets it out. He waits for a shocked reaction. Nothing like that comes. Maybe Bittle already knows. It’s one of those things people know about him, after all. That’s one of the things he likes about Bittle—the kid didn’t seem, at first, to have heard about him.

Jack feels the weight of Bittle’s hand on his thigh.

Bittle licks his lips. “I’m surprised,” he says. It could be a lie; Bittle doesn't seem surprised at all. “You seem so responsible.”

“I wasn’t always,” Jack says. “Am not, still. Sometimes.” He thinks about how he’s making stupid decisions even now: he is going to play professional hockey; where does his new long-distance thing fit into _that_?

“I love you just the same,” Bittle says, and he kisses Jack’s cheek and wipes away the single tear in the corner of one of Jack’s eyes. He’s a goner, officially. “But, good to know you can do it, if you ever, you know. Want that.”

“We’ll see,” Jack agrees, though he really doesn’t want it. The thought of having his perineum stitched back together again—horrible. Too much could happen between now and then, anyway. Whenever ‘then’ is. Jack still doesn’t want children.

It’s not until later than night, in the bed of a pickup truck, that Bittle tucks his head under Jack’s chin and asks, “Do you ever miss him?”

Jack’s response is immediate: “I never knew him.”

“You carried him for nine months,” Bittle says.

“I was a kid,” Jack says. “My mind was on—other things. I didn’t hold him, I didn’t nurse him. No one showed him to me. I was delirious. The pain’s pretty bad, when you do that. I got knocked out so I could have surgery and that was it.”

“Hmmm,” is all Bittle manages. “Can I—”

“He was Kent’s,” Jack says, quickly.

“Ah.” Bittle sounds sad.

They are waiting, anxiously, for the show to begin. The air is so thick with humidity that Jack can swear he can see it. He wonders if it’ll blur the fireworks.

Bittle adjusts himself, a hand to Jack’s chest. Right over his sternum—right over his heart. “Don’t you miss him _at all_?”

“No.” That’s it, Jack thinks. That’s the sign that he’s a monster. “I miss—” He misses Kent, actually, sometimes, but he ought not say that. Not to anyone, ever. Instead, he says, “I miss myself, you know. I miss the version of myself that didn’t know that kind of pain. The pain of separation—it’s brutal, Bits.” He means separation from himself, and from Kent. He misses Kent as much as Kent misses him, he figures. Jack can never admit that. Would he keep a baby now, if it were Bittle’s? He’s grown up enough to admit that he would probably go get the abortion this time. It would be a beautiful baby, though. Jack has thought about it more than once now.

On the radio in the truck’s cab, the Tchaikovsky queues up.

“I can’t imagine what any of this was like,” Bitty says. “You’re really brave for telling me all of this. Thank you.”

Jack _hmmm_ s and grabs Bitty tighter. He doesn’t want it to be like this; he’d prefer to be held. But this is a new thing, and it’ll have to be its own thing with as-yet-undiscovered patterns.

It was mid-August when Bitty moved into the Haus and mid-May when Jack kissed him.

Jack knows exactly how long nine months is.


End file.
